#i will poll everyone for more relevant questions later… but of course this one has to be the first

[bugeyedfreaks]

Finally, the ultimate question can be answered:

[wifegideonnav]

I'm new to Tumblr. How do Tumblr users usually engage with each other?

well first of all welcome haha. the main ways to engage with people are:

liking and reblogging. platforms like instagram and tiktok run on likes and an algorithm, but on tumblr, people almost exclusively use their dashboard and turn off suggested content, so they’re only seeing what people actually reblog onto their dash. that’s why people on this site are so adamant about reblogs, because likes basically do nothing. i saw someone say once that anything you would like on a different social media, you should reblog on here, and i totally agree. and don’t worry about how old a post is, or about reblogging something you’ve previously reblogged. there are posts from 2014 that i regularly see on my dash a decade later, so literally don’t feel awkward, it’s 100% normal to engage with old posts.

tags. there are three main ways tags are used: labeling original content so people find it in searches, internal organization systems when reblogging or posting (for instance, many people have a tag for their original posts, and will tag reblogs by fandom or character or whatever - important note that reblogs do not show up in search results), and to make sotto voce comments on a post. it’s normal for people to make jokes, add their own commentary, ramble about something semi relevant, or say something to op in the tags on posts they reblog.

reblog additions. every time you reblog, you have the chance to add something to the post, which unlike tags will be retained when someone reblogs from you. a good rule of thumb is to comment instead of tagging when it’s something you actually want other people to engage with, as opposed to tags where you’re just kind of expressing yourself lol. don’t be surprised however if you see people’s tags getting screenshotted and added to a reblog. if this happens because the screenshotter likes what the tag writer said, it’s jokingly referred to as “passing peer review.” (and of course people screenshot tags to criticize or mock them as well.) essentially, tags are like being at a big group dinner and saying something to the person next to you as an aside, and then sometimes that person goes “hey everyone listen to this”

post comments. there’s also an option on every post (unless op has turned it off) for people to comment on the post itself, not on a specific reblog. mostly this is useful for talking to people on personal posts or posts with reblogs turned off. on a bigger post, just reblog it and put your thoughts in an addition or tag.

asks. seems like you figured this one out! lmao. asks are used for a wide variety of things, but essentially it can either be a prompt for someone to make a post or a way of having an interaction/conversation with someone without dming them.

dms. these work like dms everywhere else, except the functionality is limited and it kinda sucks.

games. there are also many varieties of games that people play with each other, ranging from ask games (things like “rec me some music” or a post with prompts and people send you some from that list), tag games (typically there are questions you answer then you tag other people to fill them out for themselves) handwriting tags, follow chains, giveaways, name/url playlists, and more. with the addition of polls, brackets have gotten popular too (eg the tumblr sexyman bracket). there also used to be a lot of in-character ask blogs, where a user would set up a blog and roleplay as a specific character that people could send questions to (there still are some but way fewer and way less popular than there used to be)

to be honest i feel like i have to put “discourse” and “drama” on this list too. people on this site loveeee having the most insane arguments of all time and then everyone else memes the hell out of it. google “sonic for real justice” for an example lmao. (of course there’s also very unfunny political and fandom discourse that goes on as well. i would advise you to avoid discourse blogs as a general rule regardless of whether you agree with their position or not)

tagging people. you can also @ people in posts you think they’d like or if you feel like they have relevant input. typically this is something you would do either to people you’ve spoken to before, or a big blog with an established persona and rapport with their followers (eg if you follow a blog about snakes and you see a random post with snake info that seems wrong but you’re not sure, so you tag them to ask for their expertise).

and this isn’t a specific “mode” of communication but it’s also a thing to “interpret” (for lack of a better word) other people’s posts. for instance, people drawing a photo from the original post (i cant find it but there was a post going around recently where op posted an aesthetic photo of an egg cooking and then several people painted it), or people trying/recreating something a post was about (example). it was also a thing for a minute there where people would rewrite funny exchanges as shakespearean dialogue

those are all the ways i can think of, although im sure i’ve missed some (if other people think of any pls add on!). good luck, and i hope you’re able to meet some cool people!

[artificiary-fr]

ok so arti’s unnecessary opinion time

Just wanna give a disclaimer that these are just my sort of thoughts in general, and are in no way an attempt to demean, attack, or cause drama about any artist or staff member, or community member. Just kind of what I’ve observed and come to the questions/conclusions of. I got a little opinionated at the end but I tried not to single anyone out save for I think, one unnamed example? 

I’ll put everything under the cut here, because I know I have a tendency to get wordy (and spoiler: It did. This is a super long post, I’m sorry). So, here we go...

TL;DR: I like the gene, I’ll wait for the revamp before giving a concrete opinion, there were definitely some issues, I appreciate that staff took note/action, more communication like this or the dev streams is good (though communication between staff/community is a Thing unto itself of which I probably have a Disliked Take on and that was the really long part that isn’t necessary to read)

Okay before anything: the familiars. They’re super pretty! I like the recolors, and now I’m gonna have to grind the Kelp Beds for those boss fams. Dang. I love the kitty golem recolor.

With that out of the way, here we are - the subject of today’s discussions... Glowtail.

So, my first opinion: It’s not a bad gene! I can see some curious use for it, certainly. But there are some problems with it (and yes; I am aware staff has addressed this and pulled it to fix those problems! That’ll be more relevant later on here c: )

Note One: I think I do understand why it is a gem gene. Yes, design/thematically it does appear to fit the bill of a Baldwin Gene more. But I’d like to posit it’s the completion of a gem-gene set - Wasp/Bee/Glowtail. So in that regard, it makes sense!

Note Two: My personal opinion with the gene is that I like it, but it feels... hm. Plain isn’t correct. Like it’s missing something, I guess? I wish the segmenting was a little more prominent, and that the glow or gradient had a little more glitz/glamor, maybe some glitteries around the hips, to really sell it as a gem gene. I do like the glow we have on the other bits of dragon like light reflection, though, because it adds a little bit of dimension! All in all however even so, I do like it, and I won’t cement my opinion until we see what their updated version looks like in the future.

Note Three (The Problems): The art errors. What... what happened here?

As we’ve noticed, male snappers and male tundras are the two big offenders, with large chunks of color erroneously sitting outside the lineart quite noticeably. There is also part of the ‘glow’ (the aforementioned light reflection) that doesn’t make sense - being on parts of the dragon where it shouldn’t be, like on the front of wings where the tail is not in front of said limb, but behind.

But like... how did this not get caught before it got posted? Was it a time crunch, or it just... didn’t get quality checked before this happened? It’s really unfortunate. :c

Something I do with my art - and this is just my own process/thoughts - is when I’ve put down the base color, before I do any shading/highlights/big details, I pop a layer underneath the entire drawing and fill it with a high contrast color to the palette. That way any bits where I missed coloring in - or didn’t clean up outside the lines - becomes super noticeable, and I can fix it then instead of being a problem later. Maybe doing something like this before throwing the gene through the color automation process would’ve helped?

Last Note:

I feel like part of why these errors went unnoticed is because of how often, and sometimes how rushed, some of these updates have been - and this has been more noticeable in this year than otherwise. Is it because of community dissent with wanting more updates creating more crunch? Due to low-attention reticence creating a need for pushing more ad revenue / more “come to the site there’s new”?

I’m unsure, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless. I think staff, and FR as a whole, would benefit from like... hm. How to word this...

Maybe taking more time on updates / a more extended schedule so things aren’t as crunch (of course this being said, I don’t know what the workload is like so I can’t even say if crunch is applicable), and more open communication? Like how the dev streams were going - that was pretty well liked and everyone I know got pretty excited to see em and how the art was doing. It also opened up the avenue for more open communication / more nuanced opinions or thoughts.

---

But herein lies the huge issue, I think, with communication. This is the part where I’d like to reiterate, this is just my observations, and is not intended as an attack, a vaguepost, or deliberate callout at anybody. There’s no malicious intent here. This bit could also be construed as drama I suppose, and I apologize for that because again - not the intent. Just my take.

I’ve noticed posts going ‘no drama please’ or being tired when new updates come out of like, ‘oh boy here comes the negativity’ so I don’t think it’s just me who’s seen it, but have you guys noticed when anything new comes out, there’s an immediate rush of extreme salt and negativity?

And I don’t mean posts where its like “it’s not for me” or “I don’t like it but here’s [detailed/explained reason why]” - those are the nuanced opinions I mean. Those are fine. I mean the ones where people in forums, or on the more prolific drama blogs, are just.... mean/empty? Like “FUCK staff I hate how lazy they are with this it’s shitty looking” - that really vocal generally super salty in general minority of the community. Just hate without explanation, or just kind of aimless generalized attack/complaint.

I think that’s where communication with Staff fell off the bandwagon. The really loud, really vocal minority of folks who throw super salt or yell “This Sucks You Suck” completely overshadow the people who are well intentioned with sharing their opinions or problems/criticisms. The toxic bits and really vitriolic words are what gets seen and noticed. I think this is the majority of what gets heard, which is why communication got so closed off / shut down unless positive, in recent times. Do I agree with that? No, I don’t either - but I’m just looking at this from the outside. Idk how staff feels or thinks.

And this goes for both people who don’t like the content, and people that do.

Remember that the Keel thread got locked because someone who was white-knighting started getting real nasty with people in the thread, and going to extremes insulting artists who did mock-ups to help visualize their thoughts/opinions and was just being a real douche?

What I really wish was that we could have more open communication. Some of the things I really liked to see were like: Dev Streams, Community Updates/Q&A, Opinion Polls, That Update Progress on Breed/Gene Progress from a while back. All of that was excellent. And I like to see the community responding in well thought out ways! I like to see staff more hands on too! We’re only human and love this site and our dragons and want to see it at it’s best - but they’re also only human, and make mistakes, and we don’t know what’s goin on in there, just out here.

Trello is a really good way to kind of show that communication, and is transparent, but isn’t free-to-use for businesses, so... of course I also don’t know how Stormlight Workshop runs their business/hours so I’m just blowing hot smoke. But anyway, I think everyone would benefit from slowing down and opening up. If things are going slow, that’s okay - if Staff opens up to the community and says “This is taking longer than expected, but here’s upcoming releases / current in-progresses” I think we’d be like oh okay things are happening and it’ll be nice! As compared to everyone gets super antsy, nothing’s happening, no-one is talking... and then we get hit with a bunch of updates, some of which, like today’s, have... issues.

Of course then I worry that with more open talking or “we’re experiencing delays” the more vitriolic will get even angrier/saltier which doesn’t... help... but I mean... yeah. 

ANYWAY so I’ve written a full dissertation essay here without really intending to (see? I warned y’all! I ramble/don’t shut up ahahaha) so I’m gonna just stop myself here before I start going in circles. This last chunk I don’t really know what the meat of what I was trying to say was, now, I think. Sorry about that. It was just “here’s my stream of consciousness” apparently ^^;;;;

Have a good evening y’all! Thanks for listenin’ to my (rant?) if y’all made it this far. You’re appreciated and thank you for letting me bend your ears! Stay safe in this crazy world, hang in there, and have a good one!

[tptruepolitics]

Election Prediction 2020

So, I know this didn’t get posted when I said it would, but I think the closer we get to the election the busier life seems to be. Either way, I hope you enjoy this 2,400 word unofficial read!

Half a month away from the most critical election in our lifetime, and despite what the polls may say, most people believe that it is still anybody’s game. This is so true, in fact, that the “get out the vote” effort has never been more prominent. Between the barrage of political news, the endless commercials from “non-partisan” or “independent” groups telling you to get out to the polls and make your voice heard, or the political t-shirts that half of the random people you meet are wearing, there is no avoiding the fateful decision of who to vote for this election cycle, or whether to vote at all. Now, I can touch on the second issue a little later, but I perfectly intend to ignore the first one completely. It’s not my job to tell you who to vote for. The main focus of this article will be a prediction (of sorts) as to who might win. I say of sorts, because I will largely be ignoring conventional methods i.e. polls, surveys, and history in general, and will instead be focusing on feelings. I know that Ben Shapiro famously claims that “facts don’t care about your feelings” and this is a credible claim when you are discussing an issue that has everything to do with facts and nearly nothing to do with feelings. However, in this regard, the lauded political analyst is missing a key component to the election cycle.

Last election cycle, in 2016, it seemed that everyone and their mother was completely and utterly shocked when the election results revealed Donald Trump to be the victor – everyone that is, except me. I was nearly certain, although I revealed my prediction to no one (shame on me), that Donald Trump would win, and was subsequently minutely surprised at how surprised everyone was. Not to name drop here more than I should, but even Ben Shapiro claims to have lost money on the election, and still proclaims today that virtually no one saw this coming. Even one of my best friends – who voted for Trump – did not expect him to actually win. Why is this? Well, most people were reading the polls and saw that Trump was behind a fair amount days before the election. For those who didn’t support Trump, they couldn’t imagine that there would be enough “crazy” people in the country to vote for someone whom they viewed as a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, Islamaphobic, xenophobic monster, who was altogether unfit to be the President of the US. The people who supported didn’t believe that they had the votes to elect him, because of all the hateful information that was being spread about him, and were simply voting for him as a vote against the system. There were only a few people who believed he could actually win. I was one of them, not to toot my own horn here.

Why did I believe he could win? Well, I was reading the responses of the media, and the responses of my (college) friends, and I was tuning into my solidarity. Firstly, anytime I had a conversation with friends about politics, it was about how bad Trump was, not how Hillary Clinton was such a great candidate. That was the first hint! No one liked Hillary Clinton. As a matter of fact, I think this goes back further than Hillary. Surely, she was an awful candidate that made you cringe every time you heard her speak, but her politics weren’t much different from her predecessor. Barack Obama, in my opinion, is only a popular president on paper. He was a smooth talker, had a way of feeling relatable, even through his highly polished statements, not unlike Clinton, and was an attractive man, for whatever that’s worth. Nevertheless, his policies were garbage for the most part, and they were not the focus of his presidency. The American public liked Barack Obama because of his personality, not his politics. Hillary was proof of that: nearly mirrored policies, but none of the charisma. Some people pointed out that Hillary had no consistency in her political stances, having flipped on many of them over the years, and that made her unreliable. I don’t think this was a relevant issue for election purposes. Barack Obama got elected with nearly no political history, and therefore an empty track record. No, the elections are hardly ever about credibility. So, because people were not excited about Hillary Clinton, they did not show up to vote. Sure! That’s a fair argument, and it seems to have weight in the voter turnout statistics.

What about Donald Trump? Were people really excited about him? That’s the real question! Trump routinely turned off many in the Republican Party because of his brashness and rudeness. The people that voted for Trump were different people than voted for Mitt Romney four years prior. It is true that Donald Trump did not out-perform Romney as far as sheer numbers are concerned, and it’s also true that he performed nearly identically to Romney in many areas of the country. However, there is a difference between getting the same amount of votes, and getting the same votes. I do think that there were many people in the country who felt disenfranchised about the state of politics in the US, and wouldn’t have voted had Trump not been on the ballot. He certainly reached a new breed of voter, despite turning many away. Now, the real question becomes, will the voters he previously turned away and did not clinch last election cycle be willing to cast their votes for him this election cycle? And also, will it be enough?

Last election cycle, Donald Trump ran on conservative principles, but many people did not believe that he was going to govern conservatively. This was another reason, some conservatives did not vote for Trump: they believed he would swindle the American people – run as a conservative, and govern as a liberal. Have they been proven wrong or what? Since 2016 the Trump administration – no matter what you might think of the policies themselves – has instituted more conservative policies than the past three conservative administrations before it. For the conservatives that were hesitant to give Trump their support in the 2016 election, this should be a wakeup call. He is not putting forth empty promises. He fully intends to do what he says. Have some of them fallen flat? Sure! Did Mexico ever pay for that border wall? Of course they didn’t. That was an impossible promise to make, and I don’t honestly think he even believed he could make Mexico pay for that wall, but it sure made headline news! So, I do think that Trump can make headway in the conservative/republican voter turnout. I believe that he will get more conservative votes this year that in 2016 by a lot, but once again, will it be enough?

This brings us to Joe Biden: 47(ish) years in politics – the exact opposite of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. He has quite the resume. Whether you think that Joe Biden’s positions in the past were good, you have to admit that he has the appeal of dependability. He comes off as friendly, polite, goofy even, and a return to “normalcy” – whatever that means to you. This appeal is extremely appetizing to those who care less about the politics of a president, but care more about the extreme, over-the-top news coverage, day-in and day-out of the every move of the President and his administration. The scandals, the conspiracies, the constant barrage of political haymaking – they just want it to stop, and Joe Biden is a return to that. Now, the real question is, is that enough? If we are just talking about how people feel, without taking policies and current events into account, Trump would probably win by a landslide. Once we put current affairs into the equation and recalculate feelings, the water gets muddier.

2020 is the year to remember, right? That’s what they’re saying. It’s the worst year in the history of years. Wrong. . . This is untrue for a couple of reasons. Firstly, does anyone remember 2016? That was supposed to be the year that we tried to forget. There were memes about history books skipping 2016 and students asking “what happened to 2016”, with teachers responding, “We don’t talk about that”. This seems to be what is going to happen every four years or so for the rest of humanity. The year you live in is the worst it can get and it can’t get any worse. I mean, to recap this year, there was Corona Virus (big one), George Floyd dying, riots that burned businesses and hurt innocent people, murder hornets (is that still a thing), wild fires across California, did I mention Corona Virus, the shutting down of the economy leading to the largest and fastest recession since who knows when, the conclusion of Russian Gate (YES! THAT WAS THS YEAR! Feels like it was 17 years ago, doesn’t it?), and did I mention Corona Virus!! I’m sure I missed stuff. There’s too much to recall. But is this the worst year in the history of our country? No. . . . and it won’t be remembered that way either. I can think of several years that were worse without even trying: Civil War years, any year with slavery I think would count, Jim Crow segregation years, the Great Depression years, the Attack on Pearl Harbor and the years following, the Cold War years, the Columbine shooting year, 2001 and the aftermath of 9/11. All of these are worse than this year, and I hope it stays that way, whether Joe Biden gets elected or Donald Trump gets reelected. I think it would be wiser of us to focus on what we have rather than on what we don’t have.

Now, how does all this affect the election? Well, it doesn’t look good for Trump, that’s how. You see, not being in charge of the administration has some really great benefits! The biggest and best of those is that you can point to all the terrible things that happened in the past year and say, “that wouldn’t have happened under my watch.” Is that a true statement? No. Is that a false statement? Also, no! It’s an unprovable statement, which leaves all to the imagination. And trust me; people have active imaginations this year. This is precisely the attack that Joe Biden and the Democrats are using, and it’s a smart move. It’s pretty much the only move, because aside from the craziness of this year, I’m pretty sure most people were satisfied with the Trump presidency. The economy was booming, taxes were cut, ISIS was stomped out, peace in the Middle East is underway (missed that headline, did you?), unemployment was at a historical low, crime was low… I mean say what you want, but Trump’s administration was doing well overall. The effects that the current events of this year have on the election nearly wipe away the memories of voters though. And it is all about whether the people view Trump as responsible for them or not. Honestly, I think the jury is still out on that one. I think it is fair to say that the election will be the definitive way to tell whether Trump is getting all the blame or only some of it.

So, what about the past month? The presidential debate was an opportunity for Trump to really explain how he didn’t screw up and show people that he is fighting for them. Instead it was Chewbacca vs. the Swedish Chef (yes, I stole that from Ben Shapiro, so sue me), where Donald Trump just howled at anyone who would talk, and Joe Biden just filled in the gaps with mostly nonsensical jargon. Of course, Ben Shapiro missed the role of Chris Wallace who was Miss Piggy trying to save Kermit by yelling at the Wookie every time he tried to bash her hubby. Or was Trump Miss Piggy and Joe Fozzie Bear, and Chris Kermit? I’m not sure. Either way, Trump hurt himself more than he helped himself. The Vice Presidential Debates, which of course no one watched, were much more substantive and meaningful, especially since it is VERY likely that Joe Biden will not last through his first term. This debate, had anyone watched it, would have helped Trump immensely. I don’t think it was the “boom! Gotcha!” debate that every conservative plays it up to be – and I mean every conservative. But I do think that it was a good showing for how similar Kamala Harris is to Hillary Clinton in demeanor. That could easily be a turnoff for many voters, reducing enthusiasm for Biden (or what little enthusiasm there is for him).

That’s another point; Joe Biden doesn’t have much of an appeal except that he isn’t Trump. Now, with the massive get out the vote efforts that are upon us country wide, I think it is safe to say that Biden will not have too much trouble getting votes from people who are less than politically inclined. So, the massive amounts of voters simply against Trump may truly be the turnout of the election. I have friends that believe that Trump will win in a landslide, and I have friends that think that Biden will win in a landslide. I’m leaning towards the latter. This is my official prediction. I will be shocked if Trump actually makes it through this time.

One final note, however, if you are indeed a person who is being pressured into voting one way or another and you haven’t the slightest political insight, stay home. Uninformed voters are the single greatest threat to a democracy. When everyone is voting based on feelings instead of policy, the entire country loses, no matter who is running. It is your right and privilege to vote, but not your obligation or responsibility. It is your obligation and responsibility to make an informed vote, should you chose to vote. Otherwise, you are doing everyone a great disservice.

With that said, I hope you have enjoyed this mini and certainly unofficial analysis of the election 2020. Tell me what you think! If you think I’m full of #*$%, that’s nothing new to politics! That’s why we have so much TP here at True Politics!

[oumakokichi]

Hi, I wanted to rant a bit to you about people who hate on Ouma without understanding what type of character he is. I saw some people call him overrated and "useless to the plot", while just generally overlooking the type of impact he had to the game. One person even said he was only useful to chapter five and the rest he's just an annoying character. I got really mad towards these people but I didn't want to say anything because I get scared and shy easily. I thought you might listen to me :)

I understand your frustration—andthe getting scared and shy bit too! It can be overwhelming in a fandom as bigas DR to voice opinions on the games or the characters because as with any bigfandom, there are going to be a lot of differing opinions and the fear ofbacklash can be pretty intimidating. That was one of the reasons I was actuallynervous about starting up this blog in the first place, although thankfullyeveryone’s been very kind and welcoming to me since I did so!

I can understand why peoplemight not like Ouma as a person. In fact, I think it’s pretty understandable.Ouma does do and say very horrible things after all, and even though he has hisreasons for doing them, that doesn’t excuse them, nor does the narrative orOuma himself try to act like it does. I personally love him as a character andfind myself super interested and invested in everything he does, but I canunderstand why other people might not be able to put aside their personaldislike for the kinds of underhanded tactics he uses or the things he says inorder to like him.

However, I do think it’s alsotrue that there’s a certain degree of dislike associated with him in thewestern fanbase right now that’s almost entirely a result of: 1.)mistranslations and false information, and 2.) a certain association with Oumaof being “Komaeda 2.0” and a dislike for how popular he is without realizing oracknowledging why he is so popular. Isaw quite a lot of backlash here on Tumblr for Ouma in the days following thefirst results of the Japanese popularity poll; many people seemed to assumethat Ouma’s popularity was either “rigged” or an “annoying” result of him “justbeing a fan favorite even though he’s so horrible.”

I certainly don’t want to tryforcing my opinions on anybody. If people don’t like Ouma, they’re absolutelyfree not to, and that’s okay with me! People have different taste incharacters, and I can understand why people wouldn’t like or approve of Ouma’sactions. But saying that he’s “useless” to the plot or “doesn’t do anything,”or even questioning why he’s so popular when that poll was specificallytargeted towards Japanese people who have actually played the game (and didn’tneed any translations to do so or have any fake information) seems, in myopinion, to be missing the point a bit.

Ouma is central to the entire plot of ndrv3. He’s one of, if not the, mostimportant character to the main story (yes, even weighing out over Saihara andTsumugi in my opinion). People don’t have to like him, but these are the facts.Disliking Ouma won’t make him any less plot-relevant or important to thenarrative, nor will it change the fact that his themes as a character arelargely one and the same as the themes of ndrv3 as a whole. In a game that’sall about lies and especially about illusions or fabrications getting acceptedas reality, it’s not really a coincidence that the character most well-knownfor lying in the entire game happens to be as popular as he is.

Trying to discount Ouma’simportance to the story and the narrative would be like trying to say thatKirigiri was unimportant to the events of dr1. Similar to Kirigiri, Ouma is afigure who is neither a protagonist nor an antagonist, but a central figure touncovering the mysteries of the story, someone who fights behind the scenesagainst the mastermind/ringleader the entire time. Like Kirigiri, he refuses toput his trust blindly in people, even at the cost of making himself looksuspicious or unlikable (people tend to rather forget the fact that Kirigiriwas not well-liked by the dr1 castuntil very late into Chapter 6).

More than that, Ouma is the most central figure in keeping the groupalive. Without his diagrams, drawings, and plans, the group would never havereceived the items essential towards uncovering secrets and helping them accessmysteries within the school. The electric hammers, electric bombs, bug-catchingjar, and other items he had Miu make were the only reasons the group was ableto get as far as they did in later chapters.

Very much like Nanami in sdr2,Ouma as a character is essential to trying to keep the group alive—and even intrying to get them to work with one another instead of killing each other. It’sjust that where Nanami was a leader figure by encouraging them all to trust inher and in each other, Ouma worked in the opposite way, encouraging them toband together by putting himself up as an easy target to hate.

I could list all the ways inwhich Ouma’s actions are central to the plot or where he keeps the group aliveor functioning, but that would probably take far too long. Just to list a few,starting from Chapter 2 and onward, Ouma is the only one who recognizes thatMonokuma shows up to try and give them an incentive to kill each other wheneverthey start talking about friendship and cooperation. His calculated façade of “enjoyingthe game” and trying to stop everyone’s warm and fuzzy speeches about workingtogether are much more for the sake of trying to keep Monokuma at bay and thegame “more entertaining” for the audience than because he actually enjoys beinga force of chaos. Ouma’s “chaos” is actually exceptionally calculated, andalways targeted at ending the killing game.

In the Chapter 2 trial, he isthe only reason the trial doesn’t completely trail off with no one knowing whothe culprit is. He provides vital clues and hints about the fact that Kirumiwas the only one who could have done it, all while trying to act as if he’s nothelping. And had the whole group actually carried out his plan to get them allin one room and watch everyone’s motive videos together and discuss them, it’svery likely that a murder would’ve actually been avoided, or at least deterreduntil later on.

In Chapter 3, again Ouma is themost notable source of clues and hints which were necessary to keeping the groupalive and well. The only reason Saihara even participates in the kagonokoritual at all is because Ouma asked him to switch places with Kiibo. HadSaihara not been present, he would’ve had no way of knowing about any of theevents that took place directly at the time of Tenko’s murder. Ouma presentedhim and the rest of the group with clues about the kagonoko ritual book afterthe fact too, and was the only one tonotice the floorboard trap being set in all four rooms, not just the one whereTenko was killed (and he made sure to present this clue to them even though itgot him a literal concussion).

Ouma is the driving plot forceof Chapters 4 and 5, for better or worse. He does awful, morally questionablestuff, he says horrible things, he gets two people killed—I’m not really surehow anyone can actually play through ndrv3 and understand the text fully andsay Ouma is “useless” or “unimportant” to the plot here. It’s perfectlypossible to go through Chapters 4 and 5 not liking Ouma, hating him even, butthere’s not really any way to deny that he’s a central figure to the plot bythat point.

Not only that, but more andmore information keeps coming to light about him even after he’s dead and gone.Uncovering the truth of his moral code and his honest desire to end the killinggame is one of the most tragic things about Chapter 6, and it’s his trail ofbreadcrumbs which leads Saihara and the others to Amami’s lab, which helps themuncover the whole truth about the 2-person rule and the killing game show’scycle to keep repeating.

Ouma’s actions are full ofintentional ambiguity and riddles; he’s constantly challenging not only Saiharabut also the player themselves to see if they can decipher what’s true and what’snot in the things he says. The whole point of a second playthrough with anygame, and with a mystery game like ndrv3 in particular, is to go through andtry and spot what you missed on the first playthrough, to try and see whichmysteries are being foreshadowed or alluded to early on which might have flownright over your head when you were playing before. There are the obviousmysteries to decipher, like the truth of the outside world, Tsumugi’s status asthe ringleader, etc.—but there’s also Ouma himself.

Ouma is so undeniably importantto moving forward the plot of ndrv3, to Saihara’s growth as a protagonist, andto the themes of truth, lies, and the huge moral grey area that spans betweenthem. It’s entirely understandable to not like him for personal reasons or tofeel that he’s annoying out of personal dislike, but trying to trivialize hisimportance to the narrative or acting as if his unpopularity with otherportions of the fandom is unwarranted just because of personal dislike towardshim suggests a lack of understanding of what the real themes of ndrv3 were allabout.

I haven’t seen nearly as muchdislike for Ouma coming from members of the Japanese fanbase who have actuallyplayed the game fully. This isn’t definite proof of anything of course becausepeople’s tastes in characters will still vary due to individual preference, butit does suggest that playing the game without relying on preconceptions, fakerumors, and mistranslated information will give you a different perspective onOuma’s character and behavior.

Anyway, I’ve talked for longenough probably. Again, I can understand your frustrations anon! But all I canreally say is that it’s okay if people don’t like a character. It’s veryfrustrating when character hate gets tagged or made extremely public, moreso ifit seems like these people haven’t actually played the game yet for themselves(I track Ouma’s tags and I’ve seen similar stuff on a pretty regular basis),but it’s not really worth starting any kind of argument about. I started thisblog because I wanted to be able to provide people more accurate informationand clarification about the game and its characters—if I’ve managed to do thatmuch at the very least, then I’m happy!

Thank you so much for stoppingby! I’m always willing to listen to people in my inbox, and I really do find itfun to write about and discuss these kinds of things!

[businessboostertoday]

The New Covid-19 Reality – Facilitating Business Workshops on-line

4 Categories of Best Practices to make your on-line workshop successful.

  Covid-19 has created a new reality in the world of business facilitation and workshops. This isn’t going to end soon and many more business workshops – especially international ones will be conducted on-line.

Workshops are different from a regular webinar and even an on-line training in that by definition (work-shop) the participants are expected to work and participate. In fact, the content they bring to the session is significant to the success of the entire workshop.

After facilitating a few on-line workshops I have some insights and best practices that can be  useful to anyone conducting on-line meetings with a focus on facilitating on-line workshops.

Before getting started – 5 basic questions to ask

Workshop objective Is it a learning session? Do you want to get approval? Create a change in people’s perception like in a sales situation? Perhaps you want to get feedback and input from attendees on an idea or a process? Which leads to the next question –

Content Methodology – what is the main source of the content? Does the facilitator present a new concept or topic? Is there a team of pre-prepared panelists? Does the main bulk of the content come from facilitated questions from all of the attendees?

Attendee’s “State” Are people paying to join? Is it a freebee where people are “checking in” out of interest? Are they compelled by their managers to join?

Attendee’s location/language Do they all speak the same language with the same fluency? When people talk, is it possible you will have difficulty understanding their accents? How many different time zones are people calling in from?

Intimacy – Do the people know each other and feel comfortable talking out loud on line? Do you have an option for people to ask questions on chat? (and will you be able to manage it – later in technical)

The 3 Biggest Challenges

Gauging participant involvement/states and interest

The most obvious challenge is that you can’t really see the people and their body language. Even when the video is on, you don’t get a full representation, people can have light behind them and you cannot see their expression. And technical difficulties (or “fake difficult”) is always an option for sudden “drop off” of call.

When you have over 25 people (depending on technology used), you can’t see them all at once on a screen, which makes it much more difficult to have control over who is still with you, who is raising their hand/nodding etc.

  Keeping people involved/feedback mechanisms

Even when you use a feedback mechanism like polling/voting/Mentimeter cloud words etc., not everyone will participate and you don’t really know why. (technical or don’t feel like it)

When you do have open discussion, understanding and processing information is more complex with the technology. It’s possible, just more complex and needs much more time – at which point you have to weigh the benefits of open conversation with the con of losing some of the people’s attention.

Dealing with Technology

It doesn’t matter how tech-savvy you are, you are still facilitating using technology, and have to be prepared for glitches (malfunctions) like loss of internet, frozen screens, sharing wrong screens, not being able to see the people and the presentation, losing material collected on whiteboards..  shall I go on? All of these have happened to me and I consider myself technically savvy.

Best Practices

Basics

Define relevant objective. I have written about this a lot in my book “ Business Meetings that Work – 6 steps to increase productivity”. It’s the same when facilitating, if you don’t know where you want to go – how can you get there. Sure, you can focus on great content – but does it answer the objective?

 Content – chose content that is relevant to your objective and matched with the attendees (and their objectives), state, level of intimacy with each other and of course – the time.

Time – Much to my surprise, I found out that 3 hours on line can work as long as the material is very relevant to the people, they are active and there is a break. The time/content and type of workshop all have to be congruent.

Building the Methodology and Creating Engagement

At the core of a successful workshop is the appropriate methodology that creates engagement and achieves the objectives.

Opening

The opening sets the Frame for the entire workshop – just the same as in a f2f workshop. The frame sets the context in how you want the attendees to listen/participate.  In a business (not by choice) workshop, then having the most senior person available to open and set the expectations is always a good idea. The same tools that are used in any workshop like storytelling/metaphors, establishing rapport  are all relevant in on-line workshops as well.

  Open discussion in large group (over 25)

Open discussions in a large group can work when there is a level of intimacy between the people, they know each other and are comfortable speaking. In many ways similar to a F2F situation where some people are comfortable expressing themselves and others prefer to listen.

Even so, I wouldn’t recommend opening any session with an open question. When you can’t see the people, it’s almost impossible to read the nuances of body language that tell you who needs a drop of encouragement to start talking. If you want to start with questions –  voting/polling platform that can allow everyone to write and participate.

Just remember that not everyone will participate, some just can’t be bothered and others may really have technical difficulties. In any case, do not build the methodology  based on getting everyone’s participation in a large group (over 25) .

  Breaking into Breakout Rooms (B/O) – Breakout rooms are great for creating intimacy and having a real conversation and getting everyone to participate. Depending on your objective, you can decide in advance which rooms people go into or do it randomly.

B/O Room Facilitators – Do you need facilitators for each group? Depends on the desired outcome of the session. If you think you need to keep the conversation focused and make sure material is collected as needed then of course you need facilitators. However, there are times where you can just have a head of room just like you would in a face2face session and have them collect and share the information. Just like in any workshop – all facilitators and/or heads of table need to be aligned before the workshop.

Collecting information – How do you collect the information discussed in the rooms? Are whiteboards used? Important to have clear directions on how to save collected information and share it. Also, to decide in advance what it is you want to collect and share.

Processing B/O room information – As a facilitator, processing information shared from breakout rooms poses new challenges. If you have also been facilitating a room, you have to change states very quickly to manage the entire group. The information collected needs to be minimal in order to be able to process together.

Best practices to process B/O rooms

Leave a significant amount of time and/or have a break before returning to main room

Have a co-host to process what is written while you listen to what is being said

Ask for only 3 points that are clearly written

    The post The New Covid-19 Reality – Facilitating Business Workshops on-line appeared first on Business Booster Today.

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[lefishe]

Journalism today

Hey! I wanted to share this writing from my journalism class in uOttawa because I considered it to be a pretty realistic analysis of journalism in Canada and in the digital era of the world (and because this writing was 5200 words and I'm proud of that :). We were asked to answer two very vague questions about the grandest topics we covered in class, and of course, I wrote lots on each question, developing the ideas that I chose. I somehow got a 100% on this so I think it's worthy of my blog. Enjoy!

Question 1: Explain the main challenges that Canadian journalism has faced over the past 10 years and use that to describe the state of Canadian journalism today.

As a parliamentary democracy, Canada has always upheld the mentality of representing an equal growing ground for all of it’s citizens and a forum for the individual to maintain their own right to have a voice for their thoughts and opinions. Although Canada does withhold the founding principles that have kept its operation as a liberal democracy and a neighbor to almost every country worldwide, it has faced the grandest challenge in maintaining the primary link between the individual and the change they want to see in government: journalism and its assets. Over the past 10 years, the identity and state of Canadian journalism has been challenged drastically by the conglomeration of media outlets, the disintegration of local news, and the challenges of going online. How exactly have these challenges manifested themselves, how have they been addressed, and in what state is our home nation’s check on democracy?

Now although Canada has faced a multitude of challenges within its journalism industry, these problems are almost all thwarted and engulfed by the ideas behind the political economy of the media. As a study of power relations analyzing the chain of processes that go from managing to producing modern communications material (Mosco, 2008), the political economy of the media, or really just media economics, is a method of realizing the impact of larger institutional decisions on the coinciding results for Canadian media and journalism specifically. This analysis was primordially done by Dwayne Winseck, in which his papers argued that although the media in Canada is not under crisis, it is clear that the existing network media ecology is evolving in ways that aren’t all so positive for Canadians. One important distinction made in the development of media in Canada and the world is media proliferation versus media concentration. The first, media proliferation, stands for the massive divulsion of media outlets online, the creation of new media sources, and the effects of massive browsers and social media companies like Google and Facebook on the profitability and survivability of traditional media outlets. The second, media concentration, dives deeper into the financialization process of conglomeration of the largest media firms in Canada. Winseck throughout his deep dive of the political economy of the media in Canada basically comes to a conclusion about the financialization of the media, explaining that although the “big 10” and other traditional media outlets are not in crisis and are actually very lucrative businesses, their need to adapt to media proliferation and their growing habits of conglomeration into larger owner or shareholder-controlled businesses is creating “fairy-tale levels of capitalization, enormous debt, and dubious business strategies” (Winseck, 2010). In culmination, the complex nature of the evolving political economy of the media have led to true struggles for the journalism industry in Canada, from the independent or local writers, to the struggles of internet profitability.

Local and independent journalism has never had a tougher time in Canada than today. Through the lack of profit to be made by on-website ads to the conglomeration of media outlets into massive pronged businesses, weather online or in a simple town, the survivability of Canadian independent media is at true risk. The National Observer for example, as a three-year-old private independent media outlet, sprung out of the growing need for hardcore investigative journalism that empowers its readers with non-advocated information. In their short existence, they have deeply influenced their readers and the policies that they investigate in government yet have ran into the principle problems that all independent Canadian media outlets face online. Having to use a subscription model rather than ads (due to adblockers and the unprofitability of online ads), the start-up of The National Observer as an experiment for the ways in which journalism can be funded today have in fact led the company to remain in negative gains. The struggles of this independent news outlet thus shows the struggles of trying to compete with the giants already established into a cycle of financialization. The struggle of independent media is a problem in Canada because just as with local outlets, the next discussion, they are necessary to uphold democracy.

Friends of Canadian Broadcasting in a study, “warned the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that without intervention, half of Canada’s small- and medium-market television stations could disappear by 2020” (Lindgren, 2017). With this risk in mind, over the past 10 years and the few to come, Canada has been plagued with a “local news poverty” which in turn has caused true fear for the access and delivery of information for Canadians of all areas. This crisis can easily be seen in development through a crowd-sourced map called “The Local News Research Project”, which started in June of 2016, has since tracked the disappearance of local journalism and given valuable data in the understanding of what is happening to these affected communities. From the data collected, such as in the pie chart below from January 3rd 2017, it can be observed that closures surpassing all others transitions for existing news outlets across Canada are actually even worse than they appear as a reported 120 of the 171 closures below are from community papers (Lindgren,2017).

In addition to the general extinction of local news across Canada, examples like the Lindsay Post of the amalgamated municipality of Kawartha Lakes in south central Ontario stand out as deeper dives into the real issues that come from the struggle of local news. Started pre-confederation in 1861, and shut down after 152 years, transferring from Osprey Media Group in 2001 to Québecor in 2007 only to be completely shut down 6 years later, the loss of Lindsay Post meant a big deal for the Kawartha Lakes municipality. With very little semi-regular papers, and no independent radio hosts, the area seems bare of any daily sources of news, creating shortages in pre-existing city hall, or school board information that used to be readily available. The struggle of Kawartha Lakes highlights very clearly all the problems that arise through the lack of local news in Canada’s communities. The first comes with the lack of perspectives, as Lisa Gervais, one of the last reporters at the Lindsay Post explains that “When you only have one reporter, who’s the voice of the checks and balances” and that with such a tight nit community, the value of sides on issues from local changes to national elections greatly influences the individuals feeling of participation. In addition, with lack of quick news in Kawartha Lakes, the community has referred back to social media, where as local MP Jamie Schmale expresses “Everyone with an iPhone seems to think they’re a journalist now. That’s why we’re seeing the emergence of fake news” showing the reality of skewed and unreliable news on social media. From the loss of community connectivity through events, to the loss of jobs, to the lost legitimacy of remaining news outlets in Kawartha Lakes, this local loss of journalism is a true testament to the growing identity of lobbed conglomerated news in Canada. From independent online news outlets dealing with national issues, to the very smallest outlets in towns, the failing of these sources of journalism in comparison to the capitalized “big 10” show the struggle in legitimacy, correct information delivery, and loss of forum for discussion on relevant local to national issues to the citizens of Canada’s democracy.

In thus visualizing the culmination of the conglomeration of mass media and the degradation of local and independent media, the political economy of the media seems to lack any sort of answer to its downfalls in Canada. This is because although trying to invest in local journalism through budgets and projects, the Canadian government could certainly be supporting the journalism industry in Canada more than it has. Canadians as a whole seem to understand that to a modern democracy, the requirement for journalism that supplies individuals with varying perspectives and quality information is important. And as Edward Greenspon, CEO of the Public Policy Forum explains himself, “Journalism’s main job is to keep watch over the powerful precincts of society – to challenge, cajole, educate pester” and yet we are letting it slip away in Canada. In his own research through “The Shattered Mirror” report, the Public Policy Forum found that polled Canadians although aware of the democratic implications of the strength of journalism, also saw that “they are wary that government support for the news media could corrupt this watchdog role”, and that from this conclusion, the need for government support seemed necessary, but in mainly making sure that Canada had a strong independent journalistic force (Greenspon, 2017).

For government intervention into an industry that itself acts as a check on power, the views and expectations of these interventions must be made very clear, and with the intent of diversifying and evolving the Canadian journalism industry. This fair point shows much about how journalism in Canada hasn’t succeeded with help from the government, because just as recently with the 2018 budget, civilians were given very much info into how $50 million dollars will be distributed to local journalism over the next 5 years. Instead of vague budgets, the government should have and should in the future stay proactive in pushing its journalistic industry if it has any rights of calling itself a modern democracy. A great example of this lack of opportunity seizing is and was apparent during the US 2016 election, where amidst of the highest attacks on the presidency and the lowest support for a right-winged and fake news-oriented journalism sector in the US, Canada did not seize the opportunity to fill in the void. With Canada resonating globally as a liberal and moral sanctum, and our prime-minister winning the PR game globally through his charm, Canada is failing in innovating the way that it’s journalism industry operates the competition that exists all through forgetting our advantages in ethnical diversity and openness, while staying stuck under the rigid structure of the “dark age” of Harper (Li, 2017).

In order for Canada to go “beyond surviving, and start thriving” (Li, 2017) in its journalism industry, it should start being proactive in it’s evolution and policy. For journalism to thrive in such a grand territory such as Canada, the importance of local and independent media must both be taken into account. Here are some much needed recommendations of ways to fix the struggle of journalism in Canada: re-incapsulate the CBC/Radio Canada’s almost 1 billion dollar demanded budget into a platform for sharing journalism to strengthen players that aren’t necessarily attached to the government, create incentives (in tax breaks for example) for the public, or most importantly the young public into investing and engrossing themselves in new media, strengthen the regulatory sector against the downfall of philanthropic or non-profit journalism so that these journalistic opportunities continue to support their communities (Beers, 2017), and finally, but most importantly for this era of new media and media concentration, reverse tax advantages for media giants in Canada, like Facebook and Google, that through little limits “90 percent of Canadian digital ad purchases go to just 20 ad sellers, and mostly Facebook and Google”(Greenspon).

In conclusion, these solutions, although all difficult in their own right to implement by tomorrow, are meant to highlight the very bases of the challenges that Canadian journalism has faced across the past 10 years, From media concentration and the difficulties of staying even for profit online against mega players, to the difficulties of local and independent journalism in getting support against the conglomerated “big 10’s” of the world, Canadian journalism has had a hard time distinguishing itself. Currently at the 22nd spot worldwide on the press freedom index, Canada hasn’t escaped itself either from the grasp of scandals and controversies that has endangered in journalistic image globally. Yet even through the struggles of the political economy of the media and the capitalization of massive media outlets, to the struggles of communities in supporting their dying local news organizations, Canada has always had the hand to play in saving its own journalistic industry and making it globally renown. As a common people, we should stand for a change in which the state of our Canadian journalistic industry isn’t so at risk as it is today. Through policy development and the openness of people to invest themselves into the very pillar supporting and checking our democracy, journalism in Canada can thrive.

Question 2: How has digital technology affected the practice of journalism? Consider both challenges and opportunities.

As part of the very pillars, the very cemented principles that stand to monitor and check the liberal democracies of today, journalism has had to adopt its methods of transmitting information throughout the different eras of telecommunication and has had to do so through times of crisis of change. From paper, to radio, to television, the journalistic industry has never faced a greater challenge than in adapting to the digital age of the internet and modern networks. Weather in a crisis or doing better than ever, modern journalism has had the struggles of converting all levels of analysis from local to global news to a digital age tapped with irregularities and challenges upon every corner of the internet. From allowing information to be spread like never before to the reaches of the globe to the risks of media domination by the largest internet players, the shift to digital journalism hasn’t had a break to rest. Within all this apparent chaos, what truly has improved from the shift to digital for journalism, or is the crisis we face in this transition not worth the problems?

A great segue into understanding how digital technology has affected journalism today is through Marshall McLuhan’s own equation to understanding the ecology of the media: “The medium is the message”. This complexion of the joining of the mere information transmitted to the way that it is transmitted tries to set straight for modern journalism that as the digital era and its counter parts attach themselves to the journalistic information we already know, this very information is changed in meaning and perception. As McLuhan explains it, “the message is “the change of scale or pace or pattern” that a new innovation “introduces into human affairs”” (Federman, 2004), whereas the change in inter-personal dynamics is the change that the invention brings with it. As he sees the medium as “any extension of ourselves” and a characteristic that is constantly growing, it can be understood through this principle that the effect of digital journalism goes beyond just rewriting articles upon a website instead of a page. The rise of the digital mergence of journalism has instigated a new era of innovation within its own sphere for the ways in which news is propagated, the evolution of the previously only physical manifestation of the political economy of the media into the cloud, and the ways in which anyone can participate in the basis for democratic debate and upholding.

Although it can be seen in extreme broadness all the way to specific examples, one of the greatest opportunities through the shifting of mediums to the digital era comes from the aforementioned realization of greater innovation in the journalistic space. On the internet, there has never been a greater opportunity for news to be shared through ways that could have never been imagined before; from podcasts to videos, to interactive articles that engage a reader with live statistics, to the availability of the city newspaper online every single day, the digital medium has allowed journalists to express their voice in more ways than they could have ever imagined. Not only are the ways in which views and information are being shared changing, but through the digital age, journalism as in its content and relevancy has also evolved. From a pool of perspectives and approaches, to issues from across the globalized planet, journalism has taken a significant leap from a traditional, expository style of reporting to a more solutions-based journalism, where the journalist and the informed can have a greater influence on the issue being discussed, in its transition to the digital space. This movement is apparent in the availability of more opinion-based journalistic pieces, through the freedom for anyone to write their own blog or piece reporting their opinions or experiences, and more. Through the facility of enabling solutions-based journalism through the internet, it is no wonder that as individuals, we have never had a greater time of personal connection to the issues that matter to us. By raising issues that can be shared across the globe, the medium of the internet has also allowed for giant social movements, collections of petitions, and the use of websites like Patreon and GoFundMe to respond directly in mass to issues that journalists have brought to light, and to uphold the individual duty of all, not just journalists, to act as watchdogs to those in power.

Innovation in the medium of digital journalism has also helped surface a greater trend for journalism education. As it will come more apparent in later sections, the transition to the digital medium has caused major problems for the existence of local and regional news outlets across the world, and in its fall, has left an open area for communities to discover what enables them to stay informed. Weather it’s student newspapers expanding their horizons of news collecting to fill the void of the community and cities around them, to the niche interests of people globally all being able to use the ease of internet access in order to share their news, the digital medium has allowed anyone and any community to truly investigate and share as much news as they well desire. Through the internet, the educating of every individual can be facilitated, allowing them to participate and respond to the issues that interest them. See, although the survivability of local news stations and newspapers is beyond threatened by the transition to a digital medium of journalism, this separation of communities is still opening up a new space for different communities to flourish. Although this sounds convoluted, let’s observe this through two websites that embrace journalism for a community.

The first, Beme News is a relatively small news organization that has gone through multiple changes in it’s existence. First trying to compete against Snapchat as a social media platform, the company was sold after an unsuccessful run to CNN, where the brand was changed into a small branch of news, posted on YouTube. Their channel, with only 275 thousand subscribers put out extremely thorough investigative pieces on what the modern informed person could find interesting, through topics like Bitcoin, hurricane Irma, Tesla, net neutrality, to revolutions and electoral conflicts across the world. Although the company was disbanded very recently by CNN (probably due to the difficulty of making a profit through online journalism, and not based on the quality of the content), the YouTube channel and the reporters behind it are still sharing their work. This company is a great example of the benefits of digital journalism because comparably to companies like Vox or Buzzfeed, Beme in the wave of entrepreneurial new media has focused it’s reporting on the individual, the stories that matter in a modern context, and sharing this information through a video medium that people enjoy, and that would have never existed before hand.

Secondly, with personal experience on the workings of this independent news outlet, HLTV stands as an outcome of the possibilities that the internet has allowed for in digital journalism. As a news site and statistics megaplex, the independent running of HLTV as a Counter-Strike (A very popular video game) news outlet for the past 10 years and more shows the possibility of community development through the internet. Without the modern mediums of the digital age, such a website would have never existed, and have never allowed for a community to flourish around the investigative pieces, reflective articles and news updates that HLTV puts out regularly. In addition to allowing for a previously untapped journalistic community to flourish, HLTV also stands as a true upholder of the importance in knowledge based journalism, accurate reporting, and opinion making in its pieces. With rising concerns about the fallibility of the news online through fake news and unbalanced organizations, HLTV through its process of fact verification, removal of opinion, and use of its own incredibly interactive statistics database can engage its own community reliably and truthfully.

Although the innovations of digital journalism presented seem irreputable in their effect on the positive growth of journalism, the truth of the matter lays on an edge. Through the innovations of news sharing and creation, many would consider the digital era as one greater democratization as the globalization of news access and creation is allowing the individual to have a greater role in watching over the powers over them. In hindsight though, the impact of digital journalism is actually playing a balanced role in democratizing, but also causing greater business and philosophical challenges across its sphere of influence. These challenges range from the political economy implications of news organizations manifesting themselves online, the possibilities of news creation and distribution by anyone, to the actual libertarian voice of online journalism not being as global as it may be perceived.

The greatest overarching problem that has been encountered in the transition towards the medium of the internet has been the adaptation of established news organizations, local, and independent media outlets to the challenge of such an easily and readily accessible space by all people globally. This issue can be compacted or unravelled in a multitude of ways, but in start, begins with major news outlets first posting their daily news and articles to their own online websites. The problem that arises with online news websites comes from the profitability requirements that are difficult to be met. “Technology has torn apart the two businesses – advertising and news – that used to be bound together by the physical artefact of the newspaper” (Simons, 2017), where people who wanted to buy cars or houses through physical ads found it in their daily newspaper. Now though, the problem arises for online based news websites because advertising online is much cheaper, and while based through Google ad integration, doesn’t actually pay the journalist directly. This has caused struggles for the biggest journalist websites on the web, and through their innovation of subscription based models, allows them still to render enough profit to keep publishing. The real economic tragedy that exists in this transition to online profitability is a degradation of the rise of local and independent media outlets. See in gigantic news organizations like The New York Times, or The Washington Post, bypassing unprofitable ads for subscription adherences works because of the sheer mass of their readers, their influence in only allowing these subscribers to see their articles, and the actual profitability that can arise from such a system. For local newspapers or rising independent media (like The National Observer), the prospect of almost no ad revenue and a smaller, or potentially growing reader base having to subscribe to view their content may scare many off to enjoy the open sharing of news across social media instead. With the already grand wave of disappearing local news outlets from readers just preferring the availability of always accessible global news on the internet, and the difficulties of running a media outlet as an interdependent force against the strength of the largest conglomerated players in the political economy of the media, it comes to no surprise that digital journalism has endangered the watchdog journalism that keeps check upon the powers of the world, weather at the highest echelon, all the way down to the local communities that we all live in.

In journalistic void that has arisen from the advertising model failure for independent and local news stations, a new type of journalist has established themselves as the global players in news propagation. Without employing any journalists, Google and Facebook as the largest social media engines have become the true power house publishers of the world. As recyclers of news posted through the largest journalistic industries, these mere monopolies of the advertising model rely on attaching relevant articles and advertisements to all its users through the collection of their personal interests and profiles. This economic disaster for smaller news organizations has resulted in Google and Facebook, as managers of advertisements to collect an estimated 90 cents on every dollar spent in advertising across the western world (Simons, 2017). As social media platforms in their own rights (Google also owns YouTube), these mega players in the journalistic industry also are massive distributors of false information, due to the philosophical issues that come from such an open internet.

The problems with Facebook and Google being such giant players in the journalism industry can be boiled down to the individual. As anyone with a phone or camera is capable of writing or recording the information that they so desire, weather accurate or false, and distribute it online through social media, “Journalists have lost their monopoly”. As “the lines separating reporters, editors and audiences have become very blurry” (Basen, 2009), the risks of having such an open internet become increasingly apparent. Through instant forwarding and publication across this new digital medium, news that is published by anyone across social media can be seen by anyone worldwide, and assumed to be true. This is the root that has been established in the fake news conundrum across the internet, because through the instant flow of information, and the human factor of laziness in not questioning the validity of all the information online, the growth and continued spread of news across social media sites like Google and Facebook shows a major threat in the continued existence of true news organizations that report through reputation. The fear in the growth of these media mega plexes is that “a well-functioning democracy still cries out for human beings who, however imperfectly, go to work every day to sort the consequential from the ephemeral and, yes, fact from fiction” (Greenspon, 2017). Without the human aspect in journalism, the whole responsibility and opinion discussion aspect of journalism is removed. If the fear of lack of accountability for information, the loss of media literacy, and the degradation of the local and independent news survivability isn’t enough, understand also that in an era where Google and Facebook tailor their news to the viewer, and anyone can write and publish the news based on their personal perspective, the digital cocoon created by the digital journalism industry will end up separating every individual more than allowing them greater tools for democratization. As you “only see things you agree with, only learn what you already know” and “block the shocks and hard truths, the things you don’t agree with” (Newton, 2013), we become disconnected with the need for real news organizations in their ability to objectively shape and portray the information that is relevant to all citizens.

In the growing concerns about the philosophical and economical challenges of a shift towards larger conglomeration of news in media super giants, many forget to realize that the digital era of journalism hasn’t had an equal distribution of effects across the world. As the Freedom of the Press 2017 statistics show, an estimated 13% of the world actually enjoys a free press (including journalist safety, minimal state intervention, and minimal economic pressures on the press). The document itself tries to explain that other than most western countries, the press online has become a new target for authoritarian restrictions of the freedom of information, the undermining of traditional media outlets by political figures, and the rejecting of the journalistic industries role in ensuring checks and balances on the powers of nations (as shown by Trump’s inherent hatred for the journalist media). “The rise of the internet weakened the financial underpinnings of long-established media organizations” (Abramowitz, 2017), has changed the political economy of the biggest media companies, reducing the power of local news organizations, and has caused the definitive polarization of news outlets across nations. As the very symbolistic democratic nations of the world struggle to keep the freedom of the press alive in the midst of a new era of digitalization, it becomes increasingly more difficult to see these nations stand as examples for the governments and states that keep the press under wraps (Abramowitz, 2017). Through the crumbling of the financial supports that have kept journalists afloat and still able to spread their information, other factors such as the repeal of net neutrality in the United States create as many issues for the freedom of the press as with repressed countries. In whole, the digital era has in itself disrupted the very bases that kept journalists still writing, but has also been adapted worldwide as just another medium that can be blocked in the nations that disagree with the freedom of the press. To say that the press has then globalized would be quite an overstatement.

In conclusion, although the final points have most likely seemed as huge, uninterruptable obstacles in the degradation of journalism as we know it through its evolution in the digital medium, the fall of journalism is not upon us. As individuals of liberal democracies, the people of our nations have understood the continued importance of supporting our journalistic enterprises, weather locally, independently, or globally. The digital era is one that has not opened itself fully to the vast innovations that will flourish from it, and in reality, the transition to the medium of the internet might never end. For now though, we must realize that in order to keep our necessary check on government alive, we must band together in supporting the journalists that have done their duty since the birth of democracies. We hold it upon ourselves to endure the temptations of isolating our ideas and opinions within the new social media giants of the internet, and vow that the freedom of the press will always be an ongoing battle. Globalization has given us this new digital medium, and in order to protect our right to be individually informed and ready to question the powers above, we must keep supporting the journalism industry, no matter the medium that it places itself in.

[absurdfuture]

THE “WHERE’S MY ELEPHANT?” THEORY OF HISTORY

According to my dad, there are two major theories of history. The first, the “conspiracy theory,” holds that there exists a shadowy elite behind all the various outrages which constitute the whole grim story of mankind, deliberately manufacturing evil to suit their nefarious designs. The advantage of subscribing to the conspiracy theory is that if you were to find some way of unraveling the conspiracy, you would be able to make everything all better.But the second theory, which my dad personally would always say he subscribed to, is the “cock-up theory,” holds that all the bad things that happen are essentially just mistakes: that it is human to err and so, ultimately, nothing can ever really improve. Incremental gains, sure, can sometimes be made, but someone is always bound to cock things up again.My dad tended to raise the cock-up theory against my naïve attempts at teenage dinner-table Marxism, since he assumed that any sort of central state intervention — under which he included any attempt to make things better for people using politics — was likely to result in more cock-ups. So I guess the distinction between these two folk historiographies has always bugged me.Which is why I'm going to sketch a third one. Call this the “where’s my elephant?” theory of history (I got this phrase from someone who follows me on twitter who goes by “JamesFerraroFan”).The “where’s my elephant?” theory takes it name, of course, from The Simpsons episode in which Bart gets an elephant (Season 5, episode 17, to be precise). For those of you who don't know the episode: Bart wins a radio contest where you have to answer a phone call with the phrase, “KBBL is going to give me something stupid.” That “something stupid” turns out to be either $10,000, or “the gag prize”: a full-grown African elephant. Much to the presenters’ surprise, Bart chooses the elephant — which is a problem for the radio station, since they don't actually have an elephant to give him. After some attempts at negotiation (the presenters offer Principal Skinner $10,000 to go about with his pants pulled down for the rest of the school year; the presenters offer to use the $10,000 to turn Skinner into “some sort of lobster-like creature”), Bart finds himself kicked out of the radio station, screaming “where's my elephant?”The story is picked up by the news (Kent Brockman: “Isn't that what we're all asking in our own lives? Where's my elephant? I know that's what I've been asking.”), which leads to the presenters being threatened with the loss of their jobs, which leads to them to obtain the elephant for Bart. Bart has won his joke prize, but now he must deal with the joke's consequences. Predictably, the elephant proves impossible for the Simpson family to keep — it costs them a huge amount of money and does a significant amount of damage to local real estate. In the end, they give the elephant away to an animal sanctuary. A few seasons later (in the episode in which the Simpson family hosts Apu’s wedding in their back garden), Bart is barely able to remember that he even had an elephant at all.In short then, the “where’s my elephant?” theory holds the following:If you give someone a joke option, they will take it.The joke option is a (usually) a joke option for a reason, and choosing it will cause everyone a lot of problems.In time, the joke will stop being funny, and people will just sort of lose interest in it.No one ever learns anything.So what evidence is there that the question “where’s my elephant?” has somehow been in the background throughout the history of our species, the driving force behind all human events?Well, here’s one somewhat news-relevant example: On Friday, the UK will officially leave the European Union. In a sense, this event will conclude the almost four years of political turmoil that have raged in my home country following the June 2016 Brexit referendum. But of course “in a sense” is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting here. In truth, the agreement to withdraw passed by Boris Johnson's government only really settles a few formalities about what will happen the day the UK ceases to be an EU member state, with much of Britain's future relationship with Europe still to be agreed upon (questions of how trade will work, how the borders will work, etc.). Given the difficulties still to come, it is no surprise that the conservative Tory party — which most recently campaigned on a platform of pretty well ending Brexit, and indeed politics in general, forever — have moved to ban the word “Brexit” after January 31. Brexit will remain with us — and yet, even as it continues to happen, it will be forced into feeling like a distant memory, the after-image of some unpleasantness we no longer wish even to understand.And perhaps it was the same with Boaty McBoatface. In hindsight, everyone should have always known that people were going to vote for Brexit — because a few months before the referendum, a poll to name a new vessel owned by the British National Environment Research Council was topped, following a social media campaign, by the suggestion “Boaty McBoatface”. In the end though, the public were denied the opportunity to call a research vessel something manifestly very silly, with the then-Science Minister Jo Johnson (Boris’s centrist, anti-Brexit brother) intervening to ensure that the boat would be called “RRS Sir David Attenborough.” “Boaty McBoatface” still became the name of something — but only one of Attenborough’s remote-controlled submersibles. As with Brexit, the Boaty McBoatface poll saw the public voting en masse for the joke option, the option no-one ever expected them to choose — in part, one suspects, simply because the people in charge had not thought to plan for what would happen if they did so.The difference, of course, is that the Boaty McBoatface vote was trivial enough to be dismissed, but then-Prime Minister David Cameron had held the Brexit referendum in order to resolve an internecine conflict within his own party, which made that act of voting for the joke option significant enough to trigger a constitutional crisis.HOW THE PENTAGON MANAGED TO FORGET THAT PEOPLE WILL INEVITABLY CHOOSE THE JOKE OPTION WHILE TALKING TO PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP IS BEYOND ME.Similar forces were at work when Donald Trump was elected towards the end of the same year. In part, “similar forces” here mean a resurgent nativism, but it’s also significant that for more than a decade, the idea of “President Trump” had been used as a punchline by comedies like The Simpsons. “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican,” quipped Seth Myers at the 2011 White House Correspondent's Dinner, “which is surprising, because I just assumed he was running for president as a joke.” Trump was never supposed to become the president; the mere idea of him doing so somehow upset the order of reality, and that was a huge part of his appeal. In almost exactly the same way, Boris Johnson, Trump’s UK analogue, first rose to prominence via his appearances on the BBC panel comedy show Have I Got News For You?, where he excelled at playing a blustering, upper-class twit Tory MP character called “Boris Johnson.” By the mid-2010s, Johnson was widely presumed to be a future Tory leader — but only because people had first had the idea “what if Boris Johnson was the Prime Minister?” pop into their heads as a joke.Meanwhile, earlier this year, Trump (allegedly) decided to have Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani assassinated because Pentagon officials tacked on the option of doing so in a briefing to “make the other options seem reasonable”. How the Pentagon managed to forget that people will inevitably choose the joke option while talking to President Donald Trump is beyond me.In my dad’s “conspiracy theory,” the driving force behind history is malice; on his “cock-up theory,” history is propelled by incompetence. But according to the “where’s my elephant?” theory, history is shaped by something rather more positive: desire. Specifically, the desire operative behind the “where’s my elephant?” theory is the desire for transgression. Humor, after all, exists at the limits of our world: the comedian Stewart Lee’s theory of clowning says that the purpose of jokes is to set out, and thus legislate, the boundaries of acceptable behavior. To make the “joke option” a reality, then, is to transgress the limits the joke itself sets out.Sometimes this can be joyous. Consider this oral history of the time the dog ate that guy's donor heart on the teen drama One Tree Hill, which happened (it seems) because the writers came up with it as a joke option, then essentially baited themselves into choosing it for real. But more often (and certainly when it comes to things more consequential than teen dramas), it’s a disaster — because now that the joke option has actually happened, it's no longer locatable at the margins of possibility, so it’s no longer particularly funny. Then all you’re left with is something that there were previously very good reasons not to let happen — and everyone is going to have to adapt around them. No wonder a public that was already bored enough with reality to vote for something as ridiculous as Brexit lost interest pretty quickly when it turned out that Brexit was in fact a very hard thing to do.So how should we respond to all this? Well, one major reaction to both Brexit and Trump was a sort of renewed call for everyone to be simply a lot more sensible. But this is strategically very stupid, like thinking the solution to your kid loudly demanding ice cream for breakfast is to offer them broccoli instead. Probably the closest we’ve yet come to using the “where’s my elephant?” theory for good instead of evil was in Britain in 2017, when we almost managed to get Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn elected prime minister using memes.Back then, the idea of a Corbyn premiership seemed, if not completely ridiculous, then at least fantastical — in large part, because the media had spent the past year and a bit making it seem so (indeed, Corbyn was only ever let onto the ballot for the 2015 Labour leadership election as a sort of joke option in the first place — endorsed by members of Parliament who never thought he would win). Unfortunately, by 2019, the quite-good 2017 result had lent the idea of “Prime Minister Corbyn” the smack of realism, and Labour was unable to capture the same utopian joy.Perhaps though there is still a clue here. If the “where’s my elephant?” theory is broadly correct, and history is driven by desire, then, well, not all of our desires are simply aimed at transgression for its own sake. In the “where’s my elephant?” theory, the world-spirit is rendered as Bart Simpson, perennially a 10-year-old scamp (if we wanted to historicize the historiography, perhaps we could speculate that the “where’s my elephant?” theory is the product that makes it impossible for everyone, regardless of age, to grow up).Bart can, yes, be mischievous and destructive, but not all his desires are anti-social ones. He is the kid who gets the principal fired after his dog runs loose in the school vents; who makes 900 dollary-doo collect calls to Australia; who responds to the command “go to bed” by going, instead, “to bread. ”But he is also a sweet boy who needs his family’s love and wants his mom and dad to be proud of him — the Bart of episodes like “Marge Be Not Proud”. If we are doomed to be Bart Simpson, then we must figure out how to be that Bart Simpson, instead.

[samosoapsoup]

The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age

Three artists and a pair of curators came together at The New York Times to attempt to make a list of the era’s essential artworks. Here’s their conversation.

On a recent afternoon in June, T Magazine assembled two curators and three artists — David Breslin, the director of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the American conceptual artist Martha Rosler; Kelly Taxter, a curator of contemporary art at the Jewish Museum; the Thai conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija; and the American artist Torey Thornton — at the New York Times building to discuss what they considered to be the 25 works of art made after 1970 that define the contemporary age, by anyone, anywhere. The assignment was intentionally wide in its range: What qualifies as “contemporary”? Was this an artwork that had a personal significance, or was its meaning widely understood? Was its influence broadly recognized by critics? Or museums? Or other artists? Originally, each of the participants was asked to nominate 10 artworks — the idea being that everyone would then rank each list to generate a master list that would be debated upon meeting.

Unsurprisingly, the system fell apart. It was impossible, some argued, to rank art. It was also impossible to select just 10. (Rosler, in fact, objected to the whole premise, though she brought her own list to the discussion in the end.) And yet, to everyone’s surprise, there was a significant amount of overlap: works by David Hammons, Dara Birnbaum, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Danh Vo, Cady Noland, Kara Walker, Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger and Arthur Jafa were cited multiple times. Had the group, perhaps, stumbled upon some form of agreement? Did their selections reflect our values, priorities and a unified idea of what matters today? Did focusing on artworks, rather than artists, allow for a different framework?

Naturally, when re-evaluating the canon of the last five decades, there were notable omissions. The group failed to name many artists who most certainly had an impact on how we view art today: Bigger names of recent Museum of Modern Art retrospectives, internationally acclaimed artists and high earners on the secondary market were largely excluded. Few paintings were singled out; land art was almost entirely absent, as were, to name just a few more categories, works on paper, sculpture, photography, fiber arts and outsider art.

It’s important to emphasize that no consensus emerged from the meeting. Rather, this list of works is merely what has been culled from the conversation, each chosen because it appeared on a panelist’s original submission of 10 (in two instances, two different works by the same artist were nominated, which were considered jointly). The below is not definitive, nor is it comprehensive. Had this meeting happened on a different day, with a different group, the results would have been different. Some pieces were debated heavily; others were fleetingly passed over, as if the group intuitively understood why they had been brought up; a few were spoken of with appreciation and wonder. What came out of the conversation was more of a sensibility than a declaration. This list — which is ordered chronologically, from oldest work to most recent — is who we circled around, who we defended, who we questioned, and who we, perhaps most of all, wish might be remembered. — Thessaly La Force

This conversation has been edited and condensed. The artwork summaries are by Zoë Lescaze.

1. Sturtevant, “Warhol Flowers,” 1964-71

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Known professionally by her surname, Elaine Sturtevant (b. Lakewood, Ohio, 1924; d. 2014) began “repeating” the works of other artists in 1964, more than a decade before Richard Princephotographed his first Marlboro ad and Sherrie Levineappropriated the images of Edward Weston. Her targets tended to be famous male painters (largely because the work of women was less broadly recognized). Over the course of her career, she imitated canvases by Frank Stella, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein, among others. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his own puckish understanding of authorship and originality, Andy Warholapproved of Sturtevant’s project and even lent her one of his “Flowers” screens. Other artists, including Claes Oldenburg, were unamused, and collectors largely shied away from purchasing the works. Gradually, however, the art world came around to understanding her conceptual reasons for copying canonical works: to skewer the grand modernist myths of creativity and the artist as lone genius. By focusing on Pop Art, itself a comment on mass production and the suspect nature of authenticity, Sturtevant was taking the genre to its full logical extension. Playful and subversive, somewhere between parody and homage, her efforts also echo the centuries-old tradition of young artists copying old masters.

2. Marcel Broodthaers, “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles,” 1968-72

In 1968, Marcel Broodthaers (b. Brussels, 1924; d. 1976) opened his nomadic museum, the “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles,” complete with a staff, wall labels, period rooms and slide carousels. His “Museum of Modern Art” existed in various locations, beginning with Broodthaers’s Brussels home, where the artist filled the space with storage crates for people to use as seats and postcard reproductions of 19th-century paintings. He painted the words “musée” and “museum” on two windows facing the street. The museum, which gently mocked various curatorial and financial aspects of traditional institutions, grew from there, with sections identified as 17th century, folklore and cinema, among others. At one point, Broodthaers had a gold bar stamped with an eagle, which he intended to sell at twice its market value in order to raise money for the museum. Failing to find a buyer, he declared the museum bankrupt and put it up for sale. Nobody was interested enough to make a purchase, and in 1972, he erected a new section of his museum in an actual institution, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. There, he installed hundreds of works and everyday objects — from flags to beer bottles — depicting eagles, the symbol of his museum.

3. Hans Haacke, “MoMA Poll,” 1970

In 1969, the Guerrilla Art Action Group, an art workers’ coalition, called for the resignation of the Rockefellers from the board of the Museum of Modern Art, believing the family was involved in the manufacture of weapons (chemical gas and napalm) destined for Vietnam. A year later, Hans Haacke (b. Cologne, Germany, 1936) took the fight inside the museum. His seminal installation, “MoMA Poll,” presented visitors with two transparent ballot boxes, a ballot and a sign that posed a question about the upcoming gubernatorial race: “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina Policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” (By the time the exhibition closed, roughly twice as many participants had answered “yes” as “no.”) MoMA did not censor the work, but not all institutions were as tolerant. In 1971, just three weeks before it was set to open, the Guggenheim Museum canceled what would have been the German artist’s first major international solo show when he wouldn’t remove three provocative works. The same year, Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz Museum refused to exhibit “Manet-Projekt ’74,” which examined the provenance of an Édouard Manet painting donated to that museum by a Nazi sympathizer.

Thessaly La Force: There’s one work here that really looks at the institution of the museum. Rirkrit, you listed Marcel Broodthaers’s piece.

Rirkrit Tiravanija: That’s the beginning of breaking — at least for me — the institution. The beginning, for me, in Western art, to question that kind of accumulation of knowledge. I like the Hans Haacke that’s also on this list. Definitely on my list, but I didn’t put it down.

Martha Rosler: I put it down. Hans showed the audience that it was part of a system. By collecting their opinions and information about who they were, he was able to construct a picture. I thought that it was transformative and riveting for anyone who was interested in thinking about who the art world was. Also because it was totally data driven and it wasn’t aesthetic. It was the revolutionary idea that the art world itself was not outside the question of: Who are we? It gave a lot of space for people to think systematically about things the art world had relentlessly refused to recognize were systematic issues.

4. Philip Guston, “Untitled (Poor Richard),” 1971

Richard Nixon was up for re-election in 1971 when Philip Guston (b. Montreal, 1913; d. 1980) created an astounding, little-known series of nearly 80 cartoons depicting the president’s rise to office and destructive tenure. In Guston’s spindly line drawings, we see Nixon, portrayed with a phallic nose and testicular cheeks, swimming on Key Biscayne and drafting foreign policy in China with caricatured politicians, including Henry Kissinger as a pair of glasses; the president’s pet dog, Checkers, also makes cameos. Guston captures Nixon’s bitterness and insincerity while crafting a poignant meditation on the abuse of power. Despite its enduring relevance, the series languished in Guston’s studio for more than 20 years following the artist’s death in 1980; it was finally exhibited and published in 2001. The drawings were shown most recently in 2017 at Hauser & Wirth in London.

TLF: Back to my larger question: What do we mean by “contemporary”? Does anyone want to take a stab at that?

RT: I think Philip Guston’s series of Nixon drawings became completely contemporary because it’s —

Torey Thornton: A mirror of sorts.

RT: It’s like talking about what we’re looking at today.

TLF: Well, that’s a question I had, too. Do some works of art have the capacity to change over time? Do some get stuck in amber and remain a mirror of that particular moment? What you’re describing is a current event changing the meaning of Guston’s paintings and drawings.

Kelly Taxter: I think that absolutely happens.

MR: It’s all about the institution. When you mentioned the Guston piece, which is great, I was thinking, “Yeah, but there’s at least two videotapes that were about the same exact thing.” What about “Television Delivers People” [a 1973 short film by Richard Serra and Carlota Schoolman]? I’m also thinking of “Four More Years” [a documentary about the 1972 Republican National Convention] by TVTV, which was about Nixon, and “The Eternal Frame” [a 1975 satirical re-creation of the John F. Kennedy assassination by Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco], about the Kennedys.

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TLF: There aren’t that many paintings on the lists.

KT: No. Wow. I didn’t realize that until two days later. I love painting, it’s just not here.

TLF: Is painting not — Torey, you’re a painter — contemporary?

TT: It’s old. I don’t know. I tried to look at what types of painting happened and then see who started it.

RT: I put Guston on my list.

David Breslin: On my longer list, I had Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof cycle[a series of paintings titled “October 18, 1977,” made by Richter in 1988, based on photographs of members of the Red Army Faction, a German left-wing militant group that carried out bombings, kidnappings and assassinations throughout the 1970s]. It speaks to the history of countercultural formation. How, if one decides not to peaceably demonstrate, what the alternatives are. How, in many ways, some of those things could only be recorded or thought about a decade-plus later. So, how can certain moments of participatory action be thought about in their time, and then also in a deferred moment?

KT: I thought of all the women painters. I thought of Jacqueline Humphries, Charline von Heyl, Amy Sillman, Laura Owens. Women taking up the very difficult task of abstraction and bringing some meaning to it. That, to me, feels like important terrain women have staked out in a really serious way. Maybe one or two of those people deserve to be on this list, but somehow I didn’t put them on.

DB: It’s that problem of a body of work versus the individual.

KT: But am I going to pick one painting of Charline’s? I can’t. I just saw that show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and every painting in the last 10 years is good. Is one better than the other? It’s this kind of practice and this discourse around abstraction — and what women are doing with it — that I think is the key.

5. Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and the CalArts Feminist Art Program, “Womanhouse,” 1972

“Womanhouse” existed for just one month, and few material traces of the groundbreaking art project — room-size installations in a derelict Hollywood mansion — survive. The collaborative project, conceived by the art historian Paula Harper and led by Judy Chicago (b. Chicago, 1939) and Miriam Schapiro (b. Toronto, 1923; d. 2015), brought together students and artists who put on some of the earliest feminist performances and produced painting, craft and sculpture in one radical context. Working brutally long hours without running water or heat, the artists and students renovated the dilapidated building to house numerous installations and showcase six performances. Chicago’s “Menstruation Bathroom” confronted visitors with a wastebasket overflowing with tampons painted to look as if soaked with blood. Faith Wilding crocheted a large weblike shelter for “Womb Room” — somewhere between a cocoon and a yurt — out of grasses, branches and weeds. Taken as a whole, the works created a new paradigm for female artists interested in women’s collective history and their relationships to domesticity, sex and gender.

TLF: I think what’s interesting is that everything here is strictly art. No one threw a curveball.

KT: Is “Womanhouse” strictly art? I don’t know.

MR: What is it, if not art?

KT: Well, in the way that it existed. It came out of an art school. It was ephemeral. It was a location that came and went.

MR: It was an exhibition space. It became a collective installation.

KT: But then it went away, and, until recently, there was very little documentation available … I think it’s art. I put it there. It’s certainly institutionalized.

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6. Lynda Benglis, Artforum advertisement, 1974

Lynda Benglis (b. Lake Charles, La., 1941) wanted the 1974 profile Artforum was writing about her to be accompanied by a nude self-portrait. John Coplans, the editor in chief at the time, refused. Undaunted, Benglis persuaded her New York dealer, Paula Cooper, to take out a two-page ad in the magazine (Benglis paid for it). Readers opened the November issue of Artforum and saw a sun-tanned Benglis striking a pose, hip cocked, staring down at the viewer through pointy, white-framed sunglasses. She wears nothing else and holds an enormous dildo between her legs. The image caused bedlam. Five editors — Rosalind Krauss, Max Kozloff, Lawrence Alloway, Joseph Masheck and Annette Michelson — wrote a scathing letter to the magazine condemning the ad as a “shabby mockery of the aims of [women’s liberation].” The critic Robert Rosenblum wrote a letter to the magazine congratulating Benglis for exposing the prudishness of people who considered themselves arbiters of avant-garde taste: “Let’s give three dildos and a Pandora’s Box to Ms. Benglis, who finally brought out of the closet the Sons and Daughters of the Founding Fathers of the Artforum Committee of Public Decency and Ladies Etiquette.” The ad became an iconic image of resistance to the sexism and double standards that continue to pervade the art world.

DB: I’m surprised no one included Cindy Sherman. [Between 1977 and 1980, Sherman made a series of black-and-white photographs of herself posing in various stereotypical female roles, titled “Untitled Film Stills.”]

KT: I had such a hard time with that. It was one of those things that I was like, “This is going to be on other peoples’ lists. It’s so obvious, I’m not going to put it down.”

TLF: No one did.

RT: Well, I have Lynda Benglis’s Artforum ad, which has a relation to photography later on.

MR: I thought that was really good.

KT: I wanted to put Sherrie Levine’s “After Walker Evans” [in 1981, Levine exhibited reproductions of Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans that she rephotographed, questioning the value of authenticity], but didn’t because … I don’t why. I ran out of room in the ’80s.

Read more from T Magazine:

The Feminist Pioneers Making Provocative Art About SexOct. 31, 2017

Why Are So Many Artists Making Work That Lies on the Floor?Aug. 16, 2017

7. Gordon Matta-Clark, “Splitting,” 1974

Gordon Matta-Clark (b. New York City, 1943; d. 1978) trained as an architect at Cornell University. By the 1970s, he was working as an artist, cutting chunks out of vacant properties, documenting the voids and exhibiting the amputated bits of architecture. Abandoned buildings were easy to find at the time — New York City was economically depressed and crime-ridden. Matta-Clark was looking for a new site when the art dealer Holly Solomonoffered him a house she owned in suburban New Jersey that was slated for demolition. “Splitting” (1974) was one of Matta-Clark’s first monumental works. With the help of the craftsman Manfred Hecht, among other assistants, Matta-Clark sliced the whole thing in two with a power saw, then jacked up one side of the structure while they beveled the cinder blocks beneath it before slowly lowering it back down. The house cleaved perfectly, leaving a slender central gap through which the sunlight could enter the rooms. The piece was demolished three months later to make way for new apartments. “It was always exciting working with Gordon,” Hecht once said. “There was always a good chance of getting killed.”

TLF: Why is there no land art?

RT: I have Gordon Matta-Clark.

MR: Is that land art? “Spiral Jetty” [the giant coil of mud, salt and basalt constructed in 1970 at Rozel Point, Utah, by the American sculptor Robert Smithson] is land art.

TT: That’s crazy! The jetty 100 percent has to be on my list.

KT: “The Lightning Field” [a 1977 work by the American sculptor Walter De Maria comprising 400 stainless steel poles staked in the New Mexico desert], “Roden Crater” [the American light artist James Turrell’s still-in-progress naked-eye observatory in Northern Arizona].

TT: I thought, “Who can see it? What does ‘influence’ mean, what does it mean to be influenced through seeing something on a screen?” I was thinking, “Do I list what I’ve seen versus what I’ve obsessed over?” At that point, it’s all a reproduction or a sort of theatrical representation.

MR: Totally.

TT: I put Michael Asher’s show in the Santa Monica Museum [No. 19, see below] but with something like that — once it’s gone, it’s reproduction only. You can’t visit it, it doesn’t move somewhere else.

TLF: Are the questions that the land artists were asking — are they no longer questions we’re asking today?

TT: There’s no more land.

MR: It’s a really interesting question. It’s mainly that, because of the move to the cities, we’ve become urban-obsessed. The pastoral question — which also applies to the cities, though we’re not that aware of it — has receded. But am I wrong that the land-art stuff was also in Europe? There were Dutch artists and English artists.

RT: Yeah, there were. Still are.

MR: Land art was international in an interesting way, which coincided with the Blue Marble [an image taken of Earth in 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17].

TLF: The Whole Earth Catalog.

MR: Sure. The idea of the whole earth as an entity made up of actual stuff rather than a social space.

RT: Maybe it also has to do with this idea of property and wealth, too. The value of land and what it’s used for has changed. It used to be you could just go out in Montana and probably —

MR: Bury some Cadillacs.

RT: — dig a big hole. I mean, Michael Heizer still does stuff, but it’s only interior now. He’s just doing big rocks inside a space. Then again, that’s why Smithson is interesting, because it’s almost like the non-site now [Smithson used the term “non-site” to describe works that were presented outside their original context, such as rocks from a New Jersey quarry exhibited in a gallery alongside photos or maps of the site where they came from].

TLF: Then why did you include Gordon Matta-Clark?

RT: There are many references for me, but I feel like “Splitting” hits all the other things that I’m thinking about. With “Splitting,” it’s like a comic ending. Also, the idea of the house divided and what’s happening with domesticity — people aren’t able to sit together at Thanksgiving anymore.

8. Jenny Holzer, “Truisms,” 1977-79

Jenny Holzer (b. Gallipolis, Ohio, 1950) was 25 years old when she began compiling her “Truisms,” more than 250 cryptic maxims, terse commands and shrewd observations. Culled from world literature and philosophy, some of the one-liners are judgmental (“Any surplus is immoral”), others bleak (“Ideals are replaced by conventional goals at a certain age”), and a few echo the half-baked platitudes found in fortune cookies (“You must have one grand passion”). The most resonant are the political ones, none more so than “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” After printing them as posters, which she pasted among real advertisements throughout downtown Manhattan, Holzer reproduced them on objects, including baseball caps, T-shirts and condoms. She projected them on the enormous Spectacolor LED board in Times Square in 1982, with smaller scrolling signs to evoke the digital clocks and screens through which we are continuously fed information (and told what to think) in urban environments. Holzer continues to use the “Truisms” today, incorporating them into electronic signs, benches, footstools and T-shirts.

DB: Thessaly, when you asked earlier if Trump was in the room, that’s why I went to Jenny Holzer. In their original iterations, “Truisms” were these kind of street posters that people were marking up —

MR: But they were never not art-world things.

DB: I agree. They came out of the Whitney Independent Study Program. But I think this is where the work takes on such a different resonance now. The original intention behind them was that these codes are free-floating and, of course, unconscious. But I think now the idea that one is constantly assembling these truths, that it isn’t a list of unconsciousness, is really alive in that work.

MR: It’s an interesting hypothesis. The reason I chose Barbara Kruger [No. 11, see below] instead was that I thought she did an interesting collision of fashion-world typography with this kind of punk street-postering. She actually enunciates things people might cleverly say but would never say in the art world: “Your gaze hits the side of my face.” Or all kinds of feminist stuff: “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” Who says stuff like that? Who expects to be rewarded by capitalism for saying things they don’t want to hear? When Barbara joined a high-profile gallery, it was a change in strategy just when the market recaptured all that dissonant stuff that they had no idea what to do with. Finally the market figured it out. Just let the artist do it, and we’ll say it’s art and it’s O.K.

READ MORE FROM T MAGAZINE:

Jenny Holzer’s Unexpected New Canvas: The Boulders of IbizaJune 21, 2016

9. Dara Birnbaum, “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” 1978-79

In an age of online piracy, supercuts, remixes, mash-ups and memes that flare up and fizzle in minutes, it is difficult to appreciate how radical it was to assemble art out of stolen TV clips 40 years ago. To create her early masterpiece “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,” Dara Birnbaum (b. New York City, 1946) had to lay her hands on the reels of the 1970s show “Wonder Woman” and re-edit them to tell a different story. The piece opens with a looped explosion before we see the actor Lynda Carter twirl and transform from a meek secretary into a superhero. There is violence, Birnbaum suggests, in requiring women to be either demure office girls or scantily clad Amazons. Although Wonder Woman had been heralded as a feminist role model, Birnbaum didn’t buy it. “I wouldn’t call that liberation,” she told ARTnews last year. “How dare you confront me with this supposedly super-powered image of a woman who is stronger than I am and can also save mankind? I can’t do that, and I won’t.”

MR: Dara figured out how to get her work into the art world, as opposed to the video people I named earlier, who weren’t interested in that. In the ’70s, the dealer world couldn’t figure out what to do with the heterogeneity of works.

10. David Hammons, “Bliz-aard Ball Sale,” 1983; “How Ya Like Me Now?,” 1988

David Hammons (b. Springfield, Ill., 1943) studied art in Los Angeles at Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) under Charles White, the painter acclaimed for his depictions of African-American life. Hammons absorbed White’s sense of social justice but gravitated toward radical, unorthodox materials. Early on, he sought to challenge the institutionalization of art, often creating ephemeral installations, such as “Bliz-aard Ball Sale,” in which he sold snowballs of varying sizes alongside New York street vendors and the homeless to critique conspicuous consumption and hollow notions of value. (The ethos of the piece continues to inform his engagement with the art world; he works without exclusive gallery representation and rarely gives interviews.) In 1988, he painted the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the African-American civil rights activist who twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, as a blond-haired, blue-eyed white man, a comment on how skin color unfairly and arbitrarily determines opportunities. A group of young African-American men who happened to walk by as the work was being installed the following year in downtown Washington, D.C., perceived the painting as racist and smashed it with a sledgehammer. (Jackson understood the artist’s intentions.) The destruction — and the collective pain it represented — became part of the piece. Now, when Hammons exhibits the painting, he installs a semicircle of sledgehammers around it.

KT: The “Bliz-aard Ball Sale” was a performance documented with photographs. It falls into the legacy of performative ephemeral works that begins with Judson Dance Theater [a 1960s dance collective that included Robert Dunn, Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, among many others] and the Happenings [a term coined by the artist Allan Kaprow to describe loosely defined performance art pieces or events that often involved the audience] of the 1960s. Why he stays relevant, to some extent, is because so much of his work happens somehow in secret — his studio is the street. You can talk around what he’s doing for a very long time without coming up with a finite answer. He does not follow a straight line and can be contradictory — he defies expectations.

DB: So much of the work begins from a place of opposition, whether materially or at the site in which it’s made or performed. I chose “How Ya Like Me Now?” mostly for the ability to misread so much about the work. In some ways, it’s a point of danger. The fact that a group of people took sledgehammers to it — why weren’t certain people taking Jackson seriously as a candidate? Confusing the boundaries between what’s expected and what isn’t makes Hammons always relevant.

MR: I think that work is really problematic, though. It defines why we’re talking about the art world. That work was offensive, and yet we understand how to read something against its apparent presentation. It speaks to us as educated people, and that’s one of the reasons we defend it. I love Hammons’s work. But I always felt really strange about that piece, because it didn’t take into consideration that the community might be offended. Or, he didn’t give a damn. Which, you know, he’s an artist. So it’s the art world speaking to the art world about this work. But I also wonder about its problematic appearance just at that moment when the public was turning against public art in general, and in particular mysterious public art, which usually meant abstract. But this was worse — it was not only laughing at the public, it was laughing at a specificpublic, even if that wasn’t his intention.

Read more from T Magazine:

The Man Who Taught a Generation of Black Artists Gets His Own RetrospectiveSept. 28, 2018

A Blind Publisher, Poet — and Link to the Lower East Side’s Cultural HistoryFeb. 9, 2018

11. Barbara Kruger, “Untitled (When I Hear the Word Culture, I Take Out My Checkbook),” 1985; “Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am),” 1987

Barbara Kruger (b. Newark, 1945) briefly studied at the Parsons School of Design in 1965, but her real education was in the world of magazines. She dropped out early on to work at Mademoiselle as an assistant to the art director, rapidly became head designer, and then switched to freelance, conceiving layouts for House & Garden, Vogue and Aperture, among other publications. Through these projects, Kruger learned how to command the viewer’s attention and manipulate desire. A close reader of Roland Barthes and other theorists focused on media, culture and the power of images, Kruger brought her professional life and philosophical leanings together in the early 1980s with her iconic works: agitprop images of terse, satirical slogans in white or black Futura Bold Oblique type on close-cropped images primarily from old magazines. They confront gender roles and sexuality, corporate greed and religion. Several of the most well-known indict consumerism, including 1985’s “Untitled (When I Hear the Word Culture, I Take Out My Checkbook),” in which the words slash across the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy, and “Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am),” from 1987.

12. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1985-86

When Nan Goldin (b. Washington, D.C., 1953) moved to New York City in 1979, she rented a loft on the Bowery and embarked on what would prove to be one of the most influential photographic series of the century. Her subjects were herself, her lovers and her friends — drag queens, fellow drug addicts, runaways and artists. We see them fight, make up, have sex, apply makeup, shoot up and nod off in the several hundred candid images comprising “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.” Goldin first shared the pictures as slide shows in downtown clubs and bars, partly out of necessity (she lacked a darkroom to print but could get slides processed at a drugstore), partly because these haunts were part of the world of the photographs. Cult heroes and neighborhood stars, including Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and John Waters, appear in some frames, but the focus is on Goldin’s intimates, including her glowering boyfriend Brian, who beat her nearly blind one night: “Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984) is one of the most haunting portraits in the series. Goldin edited and reconfigured the series repeatedly, eventually titling it after a song in Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” and setting it to a playlist that has included James Brown, the Velvet Underground, Dionne Warwick, opera, rock and blues. A version appeared in the 1985 Whitney Biennial and the Aperture Foundation published a selection of 127 images as a book in 1986, which includes some of Goldin’s fiercely honest writing. A decade later, most of the people pictured in the book had died of AIDS or drug overdoses. In a recent exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Goldin concluded the sequence of nearly 700 photographs with a nod to these losses — a snapshot of two graffiti skeletons having sex.

KT: Nan Goldin continues to have a very prominent role in the discourse, whether that’s about the art itself, like what she’s making, or the problems that we’re dealing with in the culture of the art world and beyond. That body of work made visible a whole realm, a whole social structure, a whole group of people who were invisible in a lot of ways. It talked about the AIDS crisis. It talked about queer culture. It talked about her abuse. It was like a confessional, laying bare things that are still really relevant issues.

MR: It has the word “sexual” in it. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

KT: It has a lot to do with her relationship to sex and love, and her friends’ relationships to sex and love, and the unraveling of it. There’s a lot of dirt and degradation in it, and yet there is a lot of celebration in it, too, I think: being able to see what one might see as dirty or wrong as right. I saw it when I was a kid. Her prints are super gorgeous, but sometimes they are just snapshots in the freedom of the work itself, the freedom that she took with it.

Read more from T Magazine:

Nan Goldin Survived an Overdose to Fight the Opioid EpidemicJune 11, 2018

13. Cady Noland, “Oozewald,” 1989; “The Big Slide,” 1989

The work of Cady Noland (b. Washington, D.C., 1956) probes the dark corners of American culture. Many of her installations, including “The Big Slide” (1989), involve rails or barriers — allusions to the limits on access, opportunity and freedom in this country. (To enter Noland’s debut exhibition at New York’s White Columns Gallery in 1988, visitors had to duck under a metal pole blocking the door.) “Oozewald” features a silk-screened version of the famed photograph of President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as he’s being shot and killed by the nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Eight oversize bullet holes perforate the surface — an American flag is wadded up inside one, where his mouth would be. Noland disappeared from the art world around 2000, a move that has become as much a part of her oeuvre as her work. While she can’t stop galleries and museums from displaying old pieces, disclaimers noting the artist’s lack of consent often appear on the exhibition walls. In recent years, Noland has disowned some works entirely, roiling the market. She has become known as the art world’s boogeyman, but she might be its conscience.

TT: I started having this thing happen where years later, after thinking about an artist a lot, I started seeing how they’ve influenced other artists. I realized Cady Noland is so everywhere in a weird way. Particularly within installation art and sculpture. I’ve seen a lot of work recently that feels like it’s really leaning on something she’s made. Sometimes, something is made in a certain time and then it loops back, and it’s relevant again. There’s this overarching criticism or analysis of Americana in her work. Her name came back in, and it’s around and around and around.

MR: Isn’t that the way the art world always works? Everyone hated Warhol. Even after he was famous, the art world said, “No.” It’s why we got minimalism.

KT: I think Cady occupies a place of resistance, too. I think Cady’s character — both her resistant character and approach to her work — is part of the mythmaking of her practice. She’s an elusive Hammons-type figure. She’s not speaking on the work. Everybody else is.

DB: So much of the work has to do with conspiracy and paranoia, which feels way too “right now.” These things that have this immediate conjuring, like the Oswald figure being shot, or with Clinton and the Whitewater stuff that she does, with just the quick image of the figure and a line from a newspaper article. It’s her ability to distill the information, to get to that paranoid tendency in American culture. To your point, Kelly, when she’s come up, it’s been through lawsuits.

MR: Really?

DB: Yeah, she’s suing people for how her work is treated. This is a total guess on my part, but even if you think about that as being a mode of communication — that if she’s going to function publicly, it’s going to be through the legal system — you see, even now, I’m making a conspiracy out of it!

KT: You’re paranoid!

DB: I think we all are.

Read more from T Magazine:

From Claude Monet to Banksy, Why Do Artists Destroy Their Own Work?March 11, 2019

14. Jeff Koons, “Ilona on Top (Rosa Background),” 1990

Jeff Koons (b. York, Pa., 1955) rose to prominence in the mid-1980s making conceptual sculpture from vacuum cleaners and basketballs. When the Whitney Museum of American Art invited him to create a billboard-size work for an exhibition called “Image World,” the postmodern provocateur submitted a blown-up, grainy photograph, printed on canvas, of himself and Ilona Staller — the Hungarian-Italian porn star he would later marry — in campy coital ecstasy, advertising an unmade film. The series that followed, “Made in Heaven,” shocked viewers when it debuted at the Venice Biennale in 1990. With descriptive titles such as “Ilona’s Asshole” and “Dirty Ejaculation,” the photo-realistic paintings portrayed the couple in every conceivable position. They appeared at a moment when the country was divided over propriety in art, with religious and conservative forces rallying against sexually explicit work. Koons has claimed it is an exploration of freedom, an examination of the origins of shame, a celebration of the act of procreation, even a vision of transcendence. “I’m not interested in pornography,” he said in 1990. “I’m interested in the spiritual.” Koons destroyed portions of the series during a protracted custody battle with Staller for their son, Ludwig.

TLF: Money defines the art world, too. There are certain artists who reflect that but who no one named.

KT: I thought it was super interesting that we all didn’t go to that. There are many different art worlds. The one you’re referring to is one of them.

MR: What’s your argument for keeping more commercial artists off the list?

KT: In my opinion, because art is so much more than that. The artists who are at that level are such a small percentage of the art being made. I didn’t grow up revering that work.

TT: I think there are a lot of younger artists now who are subliminally or quietly trying to find a way in between, of being like, “Oh, I’m really interested in the production of this type of studio, but I also want to be more rigorous and hands-on with my practice.” Or maybe they’re secretly obsessed with Jeff Koons, but it’s not something they would ever say for a New York Times interview. I’m not going to name any names, but I’ve heard it enough to where I’m like, “This is for real.”

MR: Could you name one or two artists you’re talking about?

TLF: Name names.

TT: Is Damien Hirst an example?

TLF: Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami …

KT: Yeah, we left off Jeff Koons. We left off Damien Hirst.

MR: We did.

TT: I brought Jeff.

KT: I think they’re present. I would like the conversation to be about some other artists. I could have put in Damien.

MR: A more legitimate artist, in my opinion, than Jeff Koons. But that’s just me, sorry.

TLF: Well, who would you want to talk about, then, if we could?

KT: I would have picked “Equilibrium” [a series of works in the mid-1980s that included basketballs suspended in tanks of distilled water], if it were Jeff Koons. If it were Damien Hirst, I would have put “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” [a 1991 piece consisting of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine]. I think it’s a really good piece that influenced artists on this list, as did “Equilibrium.” Maybe they should be on the list. Maybe we’re being disingenuous. I’m totally fine with that. They’re on my long list. I just took them off. I wanted to talk about some other people for a change, and some more women, frankly.

TT: I hear you. I agree with that.

Read more from T Magazine:

The Artists Who Defined the East Village’s Avant-Garde SceneApril 17, 2018

15. Mike Kelley, “The Arenas,” 1990

After dabbling in Detroit’s music scene as a teenager, Mike Kelley(b. Wayne, Mich., 1954; d. 2012) moved to Los Angeles to attend CalArts. In each of the 11 works of “The Arenas,” originally exhibited at Metro Pictures gallery in 1990, stuffed animals and other toys sit alone or in eerie groups on dingy blankets. In one, a handcrafted bunny with a scraggly pompom tail is positioned on a crocheted afghan before an open thesaurus, appearing to be studying the entry on “volition,” as two cans of Raid threaten from a distance. In another, a stuffed leopard is splayed atop an ominous lump beneath a black-and-orange coverlet. The works summon up themes of perversion, shame, dread, vulnerability and pathos. Kelley used toys because he felt they revealed far more about how adults see children — or want to see them — than they do about kids. “The stuffed animal is a pseudo-child,” a “cutified, sexless being that represents the adult’s perfect model of a child — a neutered pet,” he once wrote. But the toys in Kelley’s arrangements are faded, soiled, grubby and worn in sordid ways.

KT: I think that a lot of Mike Kelley’s work is about class but also about abuse and other things that kids, at least when they’re teenagers, begin articulating and thinking about. That series of work was so abject. There are layers of revelation in it that were pivotal for me personally, and then as I got older, I realized it had a bigger impact. And I see it in the work of some of the younger artists today.

Read more from T Magazine:

Mike Kelley’s Underground Afterlife March 8, 2017

16. Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (b. Cuba, 1957; d. 1996) came to New York City in 1979. When he created “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) in 1991, he was mourning the loss of his lover, Ross Laycock, who had died of AIDS-related illness that year. The installation ideally comprises 175 pounds of candies, wrapped in bright cellophane, an approximation of the body weight of a healthy adult male. Viewers are free to take pieces from the pile, and over the course of the exhibition, the work deteriorates, just as Laycock’s body did. The candies, however, may or may not be routinely replenished by the staff, evoking eternity and rebirth at the same time as they conjure mortality.

DB: The work engages where we are today, this idea about the participatory and the experiential. Gonzalez-Torres also makes the point about responsibility, that an onus comes with this kind of taking. The idea, too, that it’s referencing one person as the ideal body weight, that the participatory element is not just this generalized mass thing, that the referent is just one other person, I think is very profound.

RT: I was thinking about AIDS. I almost put the Act Up logo as an artifact. We should talk about works of art that are more than just art, addressing all those other conditions. I find it very beautiful in that way.

KT: That work, in a metaphorical sense, is a virus. It dissipates and goes into other people’s bodies.

RT: I don’t even know if the audience really understands. That’s the thing. They are just taking candies.

TLF: I certainly just thought I was taking candies.

DB: There’s also the idea of replenishment. He comes back the next day. The obligation to restore is so much different than the obligation to take. The person is surviving. The institution is refilling. You could go away one day and not know that this returns to its own form. This idea of who knows and who doesn’t, I think, is important to it.

Read more from T Magazine:

A Colossal New Show Revisits a Conceptual Art IconMay 11, 2017

17. Catherine Opie, “Self-Portrait/Cutting,” 1993

In her photograph “Self-Portrait/Cutting,” Catherine Opie (b. Sandusky, Ohio, 1961) faces away from the viewer, confronting us with her bare back, on which a house — the kind a child might draw — and two stick figures in skirts have been carved. The figures hold hands, completing the idyllic domestic dream, which, at the time was just that — a dream — for lesbian couples. This work and others responded to the national firestorm surrounding “obscenity” in art. In 1989, Senators Alfonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms had denounced “Piss Christ,” a photograph depicting a crucifix submerged in urine by Andres Serrano, which was part of a traveling exhibition that had received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. A few weeks later, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. opted to cancel a show featuring homoerotic and sadomasochistic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, whose exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania had also received federal funding. In 1990, the N.E.A. denied funding to four artists because of their explicit themes of frank sexuality, trauma or subjugation. (In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the N.E.A.’s statute was valid and did not result in discrimination against the artists, nor did it suppress their expression.) By creating and exhibiting these works when she did, Opie openly defied those looking to shame queer communities and censor their visibility in art. “She is an insider and an outsider,” wrote the Times art critic Holland Cotter on the occasion of Opie’s 2008 Guggenheim midcareer retrospective. “[Opie is] a documentarian and a provocateur; a classicist and a maverick; a trekker and a stay-at-home; a lesbian feminist mother who resists the gay mainstream; an American — birthplace: Sandusky, Ohio — who has serious arguments with her country and culture.”

DB: This question of intimacy — who’s trying to police what I do with my body and how I choose to constitute what a family is — all these issues are one, if we’re thinking about how some of these works resound now. These are still things that we are urgently dealing with. The presence of motherhood and parenting are profound in the work. The vulnerability of presenting oneself to one’s own camera like that, which I think is also incredible in Goldin’s work — the question of who is my world, and who do I want to be a part of it?

MR: In both their cases, it’s about me and them, which is a huge thing that women brought. With the AIDS crisis, there were a lot of works about “me” in the same way, but it was really a huge change for Cathy and Nan to be the subject.

KT: Also, with Nan, this idea of a community in some sense of collaboration. As opposed to a photographer taking a picture of you, you’re taking a picture withyou.

18. Lutz Bacher, “Closed Circuit,” 1997-2000

Lutz Bacher (b. United States, 1943; d. 2019) is an anomaly in an age of easily searchable biographies and online profiles. The artist used a pseudonym, one that has obscured her original name. Few photos of her face exist. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that so many of Bacher’s works focus on questions of exposure, visibility and privacy. After Pat Hearn, the famed downtown art dealer who represented her, was diagnosed with liver cancer on January 22, 1997, Bacher installed a camera above Hearn’s desk, filming continuously for 10 months. We see Hearn sit, make phone calls, meet with artists; Hearn is featured in the frame less and less as her illness worsens. Bacher edited 1,200 hours of footage into 40 minutes of video stills upon the dealer’s death in 2000, forming an unusual window into the inner workings of a gallery, as well as an intimate record of an influential woman as she stares down death.

TLF: Here’s something that I’m wondering: Cady Noland, Lutz Bacher and Sturtevant are — elusive is one word, anonymous could be another — people. It’s interesting that they resonate in a time when there is so much celebrity.

KT: I don’t think Lutz was ever elusive.

MR: I don’t think so either.

TLF: Well, never really named.

MR: Pseudonymous.

KT: She had a name. It was Lutz.

TT: But there’s only two images of her online versus a hundred of someone else. The pressure to be so present in order for the work to live properly is something I hear a lot.

MR: Look what happened when Jackson Pollock wound up in Life magazine. The Abstract Expressionists definitely didn’t want to be turned into brands. More recently, curators started asking crazy things, like, “Put your picture up with your label.” No thank you. The Times reporters now even have little pictures in their bios — everybody’s been personalized because we don’t remember that the work is supposed to stand for itself.

19. Michael Asher, “Michael Asher,” Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2008

Michael Asher (b. Los Angeles, 1943; d. 2012) spent his career responding to each gallery or museum space with site-specific works that illuminated the architectural or abstract qualities of the venue. When the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) approached the conceptualist in 2001 to mount an exhibition, he tapped into the history of the institution, recreating the wood or metal skeletons of all of the temporary walls that had been built for the 38 previous exhibitions. The result was a labyrinth of studs that effectively collapsed time and space, bringing multiple chapters of the museum’s history into the present. That work characterized his unique practice over more than 40 years: In 1970, Asher removed all the doors of an exhibition space at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., to allow light, air and sound into the galleries, calling viewers’ attention to the ways such places are usually closed off — both literally and metaphorically — from the outside world; for a 1991 show at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, he searched all the books filed under “psychoanalysis” in the museum’s library for abandoned paper fragments, including bookmarks; in 1999, he created a volume listing nearly all of the artworks that the Museum of Modern Art in New York had deaccessioned since its founding — privileged information rarely made public.

20. A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner, “Community Action Center,” 2010

“Community Action Center,” a 69-minute erotic romp through the imaginations of artists A.K. Burns (b. Capitola, Calif., 1975) and A.L. Steiner (b. Miami, 1967) and their community of friends, is a celebration of queer sexuality as playful as it is political. We watch as a diverse, multigenerational cast engage in joyfully hedonistic acts of private and shared pleasure involving paint, egg yolks, carwashes and corn on the cob. Although the video opens with the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond reading lines from Jack Smith’s experimental film “Normal Love,” there is otherwise little dialogue. Instead, the focus is on the dreamlike visuals — captured with an offhand intimacy on rented and borrowed cameras — and the visceral sensations they evoke. “Community Action Center” is the rare ribald work that doesn’t refer to male desire or gratification, which is partly why Steiner and Burns, who are activists as well as artists, describe it as “socio-sexual.” Radical politics needn’t come at the cost of sensuality, however. The piece is meant to titillate.

KT: It’s a really important work, too.

TLF: I haven’t seen it.

KT: They spearheaded this project to essentially make porn, but it’s much more than that, with all kinds of people from their queer community. It includes so many artists that we know and that are making work now, and very visible, but it was all about figuring out how to show their body, show their sexuality, share their body, share their sexuality, make light of it, make it serious, collaborate with musicians. It’s a crazy document of a moment that opened up a conversation.

21. Danh Vo, “We the People,” 2010-14

Danh Vo (b. Vietnam, 1975) immigrated to Denmark with his family after the fall of Saigon in 1979. “We the People,” a full-size copper replica of the Statue of Liberty, may be his most ambitious work. Fabricated in Shanghai, the colossal figure exists in roughly 250 pieces, dispersed throughout public and private collections around the world. It will never be assembled or exhibited as a whole. In its fragmented state, Vo’s statue alludes to the hypocrisy and contradictions of Western foreign policy. A gift from France to the United States, dedicated in 1886, the original monument was billed as a celebration of freedom and democracy — values both nations proved willing to overlook when dealing with other countries. At the time of the dedication, France possessed colonies in Africa and Asia, including Vietnam, where a miniature version of the statue was installed on the roof of the Tháp Rùa temple (or Turtle Tower) in Hanoi. Later, the United States financially supported the French military in Vo’s home country, waging war in the name of protecting democracy from Communism. By then, of course, the Statue of Liberty had welcomed millions of immigrants to the United States and had become a symbol of the American dream. In the wake of current violent crackdowns on immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, Vo’s fragmented icon has never felt more darkly apropos.

DB: I chose this because it totally takes away the masterpiece idea. It’s the one statue, with many meanings embedded within it, but totally distributed. The sections are made in China, right?

RT: Yes.

DB: So it’s also the idea that this object, which is synonymous with the United States, is now made in what will be the superpower of the future. It’s signaling what other futures will be, and it gets back to this idea that “contemporary” is a total unknowingness. We don’t know what the hell the “contemporary” is, and I think in some ways, these works affirm that that unknowingness is where we begin.

KT: That work had so much violence and anger in it. Anger is a big part of the work that’s being made by artists now — everyone’s feeling it — specifically the anger of a displaced person. This idea of what we’ve done as a country, all over the world.

Read more from T Magazine:

An Artist’s Pho, Inspired by His Childhood in VietnamJune 12, 2018

22. Kara Walker, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” 2014

Ever since 1994, when the 24-year-old Kara Walker (b. Stockton, Calif., 1969) first astounded audiences with cut-paper installations depicting plantation barbarism, she has plumbed this country’s long history of racial violence. In 2014, Walker created “A Subtlety,” a monumental polystyrene sphinx coated in white sugar. The piece dominated an enormous hall of the Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn, shortly before much of the factory was demolished for condominiums. In a reversal of her black-paper silhouettes of white slave owners, Walker gave the colossal white sculpture the features of a stereotypical black “mammy” in a kerchief, the sort of imagery used by molasses brands to market their product. Walker’s sphinx also conjures up forced labor in ancient Egypt. “In my own life, in my own way of moving through the world, I have a hard time making a distinction between the past and the present,” she has said. “Everything is kind of hitting me all at once.”

MR: “A Subtlety” made lots of people furious because it was about the history of labor and sugar in a place that was already about to be gentrified. It was this gigantic, mammy-like, sphinxlike, female object, and then it had all these little melting children. “A Subtlety” is part of a very longstanding tradition that began in the Arab world that had to do with creating objects out of clay but also out of sugar. So it’s the impacted value of extractive mining, but it’s also the impacted value of the labor of slaves. And it’s also on the site where wage slavery had occurred — sugar work was the worst. The Domino Sugar factory was once owned by the Havemeyers, and Henry Havemeyer was one of the main donors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sugar king was the art king. So it had all of these things — and then there’s the idea of all these people taking selfies in front of it. It was extremely brilliant without having to say a thing.

TLF: Martha, you wrote to me in an email that you are against the idea of the game-changing masterpiece. I thought we should put that on the record.

MR: I’m happy to say that it makes no sense in a contemporary era to talk about a work in isolation, because as soon as a work is noticed, everybody then notices what the person did before or who was around them. Art is not made in isolation. This brings me to the “genius”: The masterwork and the genius go together. That was one of the first things women artists attacked. As much as we revere the work of Mike Kelley, he always said that everything he did depended on what the feminists in L.A. had done before. What he meant by that, I believe, was that abjection and pain and abuse are things that are worth paying attention to in art. And that was something no man would have done at that point, except Paul McCarthy, maybe. The masterpiece idea is highly reductive.

KT: This brings up a good point about how there’s a responsibility to question this. Is that how it’s going to be?

TT: No, but listing a work that “defines the contemporary age” doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a masterwork.

MR: Well, it could be a bad masterwork. You could say Dana Schutz [the painter of a controversial 2016 work based on a photograph of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, lynched, in his coffin]. But the questions of ownership go back to Sherrie Levine and the Walker Evans work. What’s ownership of an image? What’s reproduction of a photo? The culture wars of the ’80s all depended on photographs, whether it was “Piss Christ” or Robert Mapplethorpe’s work — and we’re still fighting these things. We don’t want to talk about them. Nobody here named Mapplethorpe — interesting.

KT: Thought about it.

MR: Nobody mentioned William Eggleston because we really hate photography in the art world. Nobody named Susan Meiselas. We always want photography to be something else, which is art, which is actually what you said about Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills.” We know it’s not really photography. I’m always interested in the way art is always ready to kick photography out of the room unless called upon to say, “Yeah but this was really important for identity, formation or recognition.” It’s always thematic. It’s never formal.

Read more from T Magazine:

William Eggleston, the Pioneer of Color PhotographyOct. 17, 2016

23. Heji Shin, “Baby” (series), 2016

Birth is the subject of “Baby,” seven photographs by Heji Shin (b. Seoul, South Korea, 1976) that capture the moments after crowning. Shin illuminates some of the undeniably gory scenes with a scorching red light. Other pictures are barely lit at all, and the puckered faces of the almost-born emerge from menacing black shadows. While these photographs might remind us of our common humanity, they are hardly sentimental or celebratory — several are downright scary. This complexity is at the core of Shin’s practice, from pornographic photographs of chiseled men dressed as beefcake cops to colossal portraits of Kanye West that debuted shortly after the rapper’s inflammatory conversation with Donald Trump. (Two Kanye portraits and five of the “Babies” were in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.) At a time when political art is everywhere, with young artists telling predictably left-leaning audiences exactly what they want to hear, Shin is an outlier. Her photographs do not answer any questions. Instead, they ask a lot of their audiences.

TT: I was obsessed with the “Baby” photos. I mean, I wanted one myself. But then my partner was like, “Well what’s the … ” Like, “I’ve seen pregnancy, what’s the difference?”

KT: “A kid could do that?”

TT: Or not quite that, but: I understand it aesthetically and I’m interested in the photo, but what’s it saying and what’s it doing?

KT: No one wants to look at that work. No one wants to look at that act. No one wants to talk about motherhood. No one wants to look at women like that. No one wants to see a vagina like that. No one wants to see a human being that looks like that. I think there’s something gross and revolting and very brave about that work.

24. Cameron Rowland, “New York State Unified Court System,” 2016

In a much-discussed 2016 exhibition titled “91020000” at the New York nonprofit Artists Space, Cameron Rowland (b. Philadelphia, 1988) exhibited furniture and other objects fabricated by inmates often working for less than a dollar an hour, as well as heavily footnoted research on the mechanics of mass incarceration. The New York State Department of Corrections sells these commodities under the brand name Corcraft to government agencies and nonprofit organizations. Artists Space was eligible to acquire the benches, manhole cover rings, firefighter uniforms, metal bars and other objects comprising the exhibition, which Rowland rents to collectors and museums instead of selling them. The spare installation recalled those of the Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, while Rowland’s politically driven approach to Conceptualism and focus on racial injustice garnered comparisons to Kara Walker and the American light and text artist Glenn Ligon. The New Yorker traced Rowland’s artistic ancestry back to “Duchamp, by way of Angela Davis.”

TT: Cameron Rowland’s work is further out on the edges of what’s considered art. You apply to get a catalog in order to purchase prison goods. A lot of the work he makes, I don’t even understand how. I still have a lot of questions, and we’re friends. There’s this unraveling of a new sort of sideways information that I find really interesting and confusing at the same time.

25. Arthur Jafa, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” 2016

At a moment when the volume of images — from pictures of suffering to bathroom selfies — threatens to preclude empathy, Arthur Jafa’s seven-and-a-half-minute video, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” is a profoundly moving antidote to indifference. Through film clips, TV broadcasts, music videos and personal footage, Jafa (b. Tupelo, Miss., 1960) portrays the triumphs and terrors of black life in America. We see the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Miles Davis; Cam Newton racing to score a touchdown; a Texas police officer slamming a teenage girl onto the ground; Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the Charleston church where nine people were murdered by a white supremacist; and Jafa’s daughter on her wedding day. The film made its official art-world debut at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem just days after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016. Jafa set the images to Kanye West’s gospel-inflected anthem “Ultralight Beam.”

TLF: Jafa strikes me as more popular, in a sense, if I can use that word. He crosses over into other worlds.

TT: This goes back to David Hammons because — I threw away my [Adidas Yeezy] sneakers Kanye made. [West alienated many of his fans when he made a visit to the White House in October 2018, offering his verbal support of President Trump and wearing a Make America Great Again baseball cap.]

KT: How do you justify that work, then? You still put Arthur Jafa on the list, which is what I’m really curious about.

TT: Because it’s not my list. In my head, I thought, “This is contemporary.” And I think that a good artwork can be problematic. Art is one of the few things that can transcend or complicate a problem. “Love Is the Message” can still be a very good artwork and I can disagree with Arthur Jafa’s approach to it. No one else has done that. No one else in history has produced a video like that. It’s still moving things forward, even if they’re moving back a little bit.

DB: I think Arthur Jafa is coming out of a lineage of collage and photomontage artists — from Martha Rosler, sitting right here, to early artists coming out of the Russian avant-garde — this idea that you don’t have to agree or adhere to a singular point of view. Each image or piece of music doesn’t mean something on its own; it’s in the juxtaposition where meaning comes together. What’s so interesting about the piece is how seductive it can be, and also, in some ways, it begs for us to resist that seductive quality because of the violence of some of the imagery.

LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. Braddock, Pa., 1982) was raised in an economically ravaged suburb of Pittsburgh, where she began photographing her family at the age of 16. In arresting pictures of her terminally ill grandmother, dilapidated homes, shuttered businesses and air thick with pollution, Frazier exposed the effects of poverty and political indifference on working-class African-Americans. Using her camera as a weapon of social justice, Frazier highlights the effects of trickle-down economics, union busting and other policies that have widened the wealth gap across the nation. Frazier’s series was published as a book, “The Notion of Family,” in 2014. Since then, she has pursued her blend of art and activism, embedding herself in Flint, Mich., and other marginalized communities.

MR: I am surprised not to see LaToya on this list. Maybe she’s too young?

TLF: Why don’t you state the case for why you’d like to see her?

MR: Because she’s not only a sharp, clear and intelligent observer of black life but specifically of female-centered, working-class, black life in a small city in the Rust Belt. Most of the African-American artists we think about deal with urban-centered questions and relationships. But she knows how to put together activism with social critique in a way that many other people have been afraid to deal with — not just with black identity but also class identity. She documented the closure of the hospital in Braddock, Pa., and called attention to the fact that the residents’ physical conditions resulted from living in a town polluted by industry and waste dumping. I think she’s pushed the boundaries of photography in the art world.

Source photographs and videos at top, in order of appearance: copyright Estate of Sturtevant, courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg; courtesy of Dara Birnbaum, Electronic Arts Intermix, New York and Marian Goodman Gallery; courtesy of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome; Studio Danh Vo; courtesy of Barbara Kruger; © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, and courtesy of Through the Flower Archives; courtesy of Arthur Jafa and Gavin’s Brown Enterprise, New York/Rome; courtesy of collection M HKA/clinckx, Antwerp; David Seidner; copyright Lutz Bacher, courtesy of Greene Naftali, New York and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; courtesy of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner; the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York; Juergen Frank/Contour RA by Getty Images; © Dawoud Bey, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco; Patrick Piel/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

The Art World Is Easy to Dislike. Here Are Some Reasons Not to.For T’s inaugural online art issue, we’ll be highlighting some of the things that give us hope in an often-derided industry.June 11, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/t-magazine/most-important-contemporary-art.html

[thisdaynews]

The 2008 Class that Explains Elizabeth Warren’s Style

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-2008-class-that-explains-elizabeth-warrens-style/

The 2008 Class that Explains Elizabeth Warren’s Style

In the middle of the volatile fall of 2008, with foreclosures skyrocketing and companies failing and unemployment spiking and the stock market sinking, 80 rattled first-semester Harvard Law School students stood outside a classroom and watched the Dow plummet yet again. Then they stepped inside and took their seats for their contracts course with professor Elizabeth Warren.

“And professor Warren’s like, ‘We’re actually not going to talk about contracts,’” former student Danielle D’Onfro told me. “‘We’re going to talk about what’s happening in the world.’”

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Warren ditched the syllabus and instead gave a lecture on the cratering economyand its causes, encapsulating the collapse as she understood it. In interviews over the past couple weeks, her former students described it as “riveting” and “engaging” and “eye-opening.”

“She basically proceeded to explain the financial crisis as it was happening,” Nigel Barrella said. “It was pretty amazing—at a time when no one else, really, seemed to have answers like that—that she would come in and talk about credit default swaps and collateralized mortgages, junk mortgages, carved up into tranches, and sold to financial institutions as high-quality financial products.”

Her impromptu primer on the crisis spanned two days, November 12 and 13, according to the calendar of one of her students, and their takeaway was twofold: (1) Professor Warren sure had a knack for talking about this stuff, and (2) this skill might take her somewhere beyond even the august confines of HLS.

“I think for all of us sitting there at that moment,” D’Onfro said, “we realized that, you know, this person is not just going to be our contracts professor.”

They were right. Warren’s gift for explication has led her almost inexorably from there to here—from explaining at Harvard, in classes, in a reading group, on a blog and on panels of academics and in the popular press, to explaining in Washington, where she came to prominence as a piercing watchdog before she was elected to the Senate. And on a historically crowded presidential campaign trail, she has steadily distanced herself from most of the field with her grasp of detail and capacity to break it down, standing as the top-polling Democrat not named Joe Biden heading into this week’s curtain-raising debates.

Warren’s professorial background, and her history as a Washington player on an issue as complex as financial regulation, has led some political observers to ask of late whether this particular gift could be a mixed blessing—a talent that also defines her ceiling, especially with the working-class voters who could make the difference in a presidential election.

“She’s lecturing,” David Axelrod, the top Barack Obama strategist, recently said of Warren in theNew York Times Magazine, wondering how that approach would play with non-college-educated white voters. (“I regretted that the rest of my thoughts were excised,” he told me in a subsequent conversation, saying Warren has “phenomenal strengths.” But still: “I think this is the last big hurdle for her,” he said.)

He’s not the only one who’s consideredthis. “It’s a fascinating question,” former Jeb Bush senior adviser Michael Steel told me. He called it “a huge challenge … figuring out how to explain her policy positions, the problems they purport to address, and how it fits in with her theory, in a way that somebody sitting on a stool in a Waffle House will understand and agree with.”

Others, though, push back on just the basic terms of this conversation. Progressive consultant Rebecca Katz said in an email, “Let’s call the attack on her ‘lecturing’ what it really is: sexist.” Added Boston-based political analyst Mary Anne Marsh: “She’s beendefiningthis race.”

On the debate stage Wednesday night, facing off against nine other contenders, Warren will have a platform, if a narrow one, to make the kind of vivid and persuasive case that grabs voters. In the Democratic Party, at least, there are footsteps for an expert explainer to follow: Obama had a professor’s demeanor and rhetorical tics, and Bill Clinton laid out big ideas and policy nuances at length, all while forging personal connections with a wide variety of audiences.

Some who’ve gauged her as a candidate think Warren is honing these same skills. “I thought at the beginning of the campaign watching her that she was lecturing,” longtime Democratic strategist Bob Shrum told me, “and then as time has gone on, and she’s done these town meetings, she’s gotten better and better at explaining and relating what she’s saying in human terms.”

Republican consultants I contacted concur. “I think she’s a much more formidable politician than a lot of people, especially, on the right, think,” Liz Mair, a communications strategist who’s worked for Scott Walker, Rick Perry and Rand Paul, said in an email.

If Warren grabs the spotlight on that crowded stage, there’s a group of former law students who can explain why.

***

“Will the Middle Class Survive?”

In the fall of ’08, that’s what Warren called her reading group, a quasi-extracurricular klatch of a dozen students who had signed up to explore the topic at the heart of her life’s work. The reading: some chapters from a book about class, some chapters from a book about health care and some chapters from a book of her own—The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke, which she wrote with her daughter and was published in 2003. “I’m looking forward to this,” Warren wrote to the students, according to emails one of them shared with me.

It took no time at all for current events to scramble the group’s schedule.

“Class Mattersis beginning to feel a bit dated,” Warren wrote to the group ahead of its first real get-together.Class Mattershad come out just three years before. “Would you like me to talk with you about how the subprime crisis started and what might be done about it? If that would be more timely, I’m glad to do it.”

The students made plain what they wanted. “Your responses overwhelmingly favored talking about the mortgage meltdown,” Warren wrote.

The rest of the semester, meeting on intermittent Thursday evenings at Warren’s dark green Victorian house with a wrought-iron fence, Warren served them salmon and ribs and ordered in Redbones along with peach cobbler that almost every student I talked to mentioned without prompting. They drank herbal tea and talked, taking turns petting Otis, Warren’s convivial golden retriever. They discussed the reading—but their conversations, members of the group told me, couldn’t help but veer away from the pages of the texts and toward the topsy-turvy economy.

“There’s a tendency in elite law schools to just remove yourself from the realities of the world, and it was a really strange time to enter law school, when the economy was collapsing around you,” Rachel Lauter said. “And I remember feeling incredibly lucky to have her on the ground floor explaining what was happening.”

“She can talk to normal people and explain complicated things in a way that’s comprehensible,” Jad Mills said.

“That’s not always how law professors communicate,” Libby Benton said.

Neither is this: Throughout that fall, Warren penned op-eds (families losing their homes were “casualties of a financial system that saw them not as customers, but as prey,” she wrote in theChicago Tribuneon September 22), she blogged at creditslips.org (the $700 billion bailout was “keeping me awake at night,” she wrote on September 23), fired off quotes on network news shows (she called a credit card “a poisonous snake in your wallet” on ABC’s “Nightline” on September 25) and lit up panels with fellow academics at Harvard.

At one, “The Financial Crisis: Causes and Cures,” she proved to be “an audience favorite,” according to the student newspaper, describing subprime mortgages as “35-cent bananas” that should’ve cost 15 cents. She was the only woman on the panel with five men.

“They were talking, just trying to explain the basics of, like, credit default swaps, and what a securitized trust was, and what had happened generally,” one of Warren’s former students told me, “because no one really understood what was going on, period. And so I remember that other people on the panel would speak and everyone would sort of tune out. … But then Elizabeth started speaking, and it just, like, made so much sense, and people were, like,cheeringandstanding up, and it’s hard to get a crowd on their feet when you’re talking about credit default swaps! … It was one of the most incredible things that I had ever seen in terms of somebody being able to take these really arcane concepts and make them feel relevant, accessible andoutragingat the same time.”

Back in the classroom, in another meeting of students, Warren asked what they would do if they were in charge of a big financial institution. Hunker down, some said, and tighten up. She made it clear that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. And then students’ hands started to shoot up. The answer, actually, was the opposite. “You grow as fast as you can. You buy as much as you can with borrowed money. And you lend and borrow from as many other large institutions as possible. Because then the government can’t afford to let you fail,” Warren would recall a student saying. “It took my students about two minutes,” as she put it later, “to see how to build a bank that would be Too Big to Fail.”

Warren’s teaching style was amped-up Socratic, fostering lightning-quick dialogue one student I talked to likened to dodge ball and another compared to machine gun fire. Her teaching assistants kept index cards to track who’d been called on how often, and it was standard, according to former students, for every one of them to be called on once if not twice every class. “Very demanding,” Marielle Macher said. “It was the class that we were all the most prepared for,” Caitlin Kekacs said. Warren’s classes, Charles Fried, her Harvard colleague who served as one of Ronald Reagan’s solicitor generals, told me, were “electric,” and her student evaluations were effusive. And she was known, at least inside the law school, specifically forneverlecturing. So what happened on November 12 and 13 was decidedly different from what she usually did. Mainly, on those days, she just talked—and her students just listened.

In its way, many students told me, Warren’s lecture was strangely comforting.

“The world’s ending,” Dan Mach remembered. “And here was a professor who knew a lot about it and could explain it better than other people,” Dave Casserley said. It was something they mostly weren’t getting from their other professors.

Larry Tribe, the preeminent constitutional scholar and Warren’s Harvard colleague, told me he heard this sentiment from students that fall. “That has stuck with me,” Tribe said. “It’s also stuck with me partly because of my own memory when I was a law student at Harvard when dramatic, terrifying things would happen. I mean, I was actually a first- or second-year law student when Kennedy was assassinated, and I remember coming to class the next day, barely able to hold myself together. And the professor, who was someone I really liked and admired, not only then but years after, barely paused. He basically said, ‘Terrible things are going on, but we have our work to do.’ And then he went right back to discussing complicated issues of civil procedure. And that was kind of an inhuman and inhumane environment. And in some ways Elizabeth Warren is … the absolute opposite of someone who would treat legal education as an insulated bubble separate from the world.”

Tribe told me, too, about the way Warren at the time helped the woman who would become his wife. Elizabeth Westling was going through a divorce, riddled with worry, when her therapist gave her … books—The Two-Income TrapandAll Your Worth—by Warren. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is ridiculous. What would I need this for?’” Westling told me. “But I went home, and I read them, and lo and behold, it really transformed my psyche, I think, because what it did was give me a sense of empowerment and confidence.”

It’s something I heard from many of the 19 former Warren students I talked to for this story. What they got from her in 2008 was not only edifying but also eased their anxieties about the economy. She helpedthembecause they felt she maybe could be a part of helping to fixit.

And on the evening of November 13, hours after finishing her lecture on the economy to her contracts class in Pound Hall and minutes before hosting a third of them for the first of three straight nights of dinners with students at her house, she got a call from Harry Reid. The Senate majority leader asked her to take the oversight position. And she was off to Washington. “Harry Reid,” she would say, “forever changed my life with that phone call.”

The next day, Reid made the announcement about Warren’s new role.

That afternoon, she sent an email to her students. One of them shared it with me. It was … not about her new role.

“Some of you have met Otis, the 100-pound golden retriever who lives with us,” Warren wrote. “He’s sweet and he’s lonely right now—desperate for someone who would like to play. If you are around and would like to have some puppy love, would you drop by to get Otis?”

***

Midday this past Saturday, in Columbia, South Carolina, I stood near the rear of the main hall of the convention of the South Carolina Democratic Party and took in what quickly turned into an episode of the prosecutor versus the professor.

Kamala Harris was first up among the catalog of 2020 Democrats, and she gave a spirited personal statement to the near-capacity crowd of 1,800. She said she knew how to “take on predators”—she didn’t need to say the name of the person she was talking about—and then built to a crescendo. “I’m going to tell you we need somebody on our stage when it comes time for that general election who knows how to recognize a rap sheet when they see it and prosecute the case!” she said. “Let’s prosecute the case!” Her speech elicited raucous cheers.

Warren came on some 20 minutes after Harris. She introduced herself as a practically accidental politician, self-identifying from the start as a teacher, although she didn’t mention Harvard. “Teachers,” she said, “understand the worth of every single human being. Teachers invest in the future. And teachers never give up.” In a checklist rundown of her “big plans,” she said her proposed 2 percent tax on net worth above $50 million could pay for universal child care and pre-kindergarten, tuition-free college, zap student loan debt, make billion-dollar investments in historically black colleges and universities, and provide higher pay for teachers. But her seven minutes on stage felt a little rote and a tad flat. As Warren spoke, I stood next to the raised platform made to be an MSNBC set and watched Harris get interviewed live.

Something that’s helped Warren vault past Bernie Sanders and others in the polls and into that second slot behind Biden? Her town halls. In Iowa and New Hampshire and other early states. Even in places like West Virginia. And on CNN and MSNBC (but not on Fox News). She’s generally better, most observers and analysts agree, interacting with voters rather than delivering speeches. “I’ve seen her be very effective in small groups,” Axelrod told me. It’s the sort of setting that allows her to delve more deeply into her myriad detailed policy proposals.

An hour or so after her convention appearance, just across the street, Warren bounded into the homier, more intimate environs in the building hosting Planned Parenthood’s “We Decide” forum. In front of a gathering perhaps a quarter of the size, sitting between two women asking her questions instead of standing behind a lectern, Warren was kinetic in a way she simply hadn’t been at the convention. Here, she answered questions from people in the crowd. Here, she came off as a teacher but also as a fighter. Asked aboutRoe v. Wade, she was nothing if not animated. “The truth is,” she said, “we’ve been on defense for 47 years. And it’s not working. … I say it is time to go on offense!” She held her microphone in her right hand and gesticulated energetically with her left. She sat on the edge of her seat. She dropped a “by golly.” She left to a standing ovation.

A little later, up one floor, Warren darted into a small room set aside for candidates to talk to reporters if they wanted to and plucked a grape from a picked-at tray. She popped it into her mouth and faced the hasty half-moon of cameras. She was asked about Donald Trump. She dinged him for his “ineptitude.” She was asked about Pete Buttigieg and his trouble at home. She said she wasn’t going to criticize her fellow Democrats. And then she was asked why people should trust her. She gave an answer that would have sounded familiar to her first-semester law students in the fall of ‘08.

“This is a fight I’ve been in for all my life, long before I ever got engaged in politics of any kind,” she said. “I’ve spent my whole life on exactly this issue. What’s happening to working families in this country? Why is America’s middle class being hollowed out? Why is it that people who work hard every day find a path so rocky and so steep and for people of color even rockier and even steeper? And the answer is a government that works better and better for billionaires and giant corporations and kicks dirt in everyone else’s face. Well, I say: In a democracy, we can change that. And that’s why I’m in this fight.”

At that, it was time to go. It was her 70th birthday. She had a flight to catch to get home to continue to prepare for Wednesday’s debate. She reached for another grape.

“We got cake in the car,” a staffer said.

“We got cake in the car!” Warren said.

Read More

[marketerintel]

Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video?

Modern B2B marketers understand that the key to an effective digital content strategy is meeting customers where they’re at, and giving them what they want.

With this in mind, the appeal of social media videos only makes sense. We know that billions of people are on social networks, and we know (or at least research leads us to believe) they want video.

Then again, certain developments may cause us to question what we think we know. How meaningful is it, really, if X% of users are watching X% of a video while scrolling through their feeds? And how can we be confident this data is even accurate, after the whole inflated metrics fiasco?

If this matter is pressing on your mind, you’re not alone. Social media is an eternally tough nut for B2B marketers to crack. In Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2019 benchmarking report, fellow practitioners called out changes in social media algorithms as the second-biggest issue of importance this year, behind search algorithms.

We believe that best answer content is the most reliable way to remain visible amidst Google’s unpredictable shifts. Is video the best answer for enduring social media relevance? To explore that question, let’s dive into the latest news surrounding the three most prominent social platforms for B2B marketers: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn*.

Facebook: Pivoting Once Again?

Not so long ago, Facebook was one of the leading forces behind the “video takeover” movement. In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg was predicting that within five years, he “wouldn’t be surprised if … most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”

It was a natural direction. The engagement metrics for video were stellar, and brands couldn’t help noticing the way this content type was gaining higher placement in the platform’s feed algorithm.

But later that same year, the company disclosed a “miscalculation” that led to inflation of video view numbers. This later became the subject of a lawsuit from advertisers, alleging that Facebook knowingly obscured and downplayed this information.

And now? Facebook doesn’t seem to be quite as all-in on video as they once were. Earlier this month Zuckerberg laid out his privacy-focused vision for social networking, and talked about private messaging as a central emphasis going forward. The only time video was mentioned in his overview was a reference to “video chat.”

Casey Newton of The Verge surmises this “pivot to privacy” will result in diminishing prominence of the News Feed, which would lower the impact of all public-facing content including video.

It bears noting that Facebook video isn’t disappearing anytime soon. A recent study found that video posts drive more interaction on the platform than other types, and a product called Facebook Premiere launched late last year, enabling interactive video polls, pre-recorded live broadcasts, and more.

(Source)

At this moment, there’s no reason to abandon video on Facebook. However, the company’s evolving priorities are worth tracking. So too are the movements of their top competitors in the social space…

Twitter: Powering Up Video Analytics and Engagement

As Facebook appears to be taking its foot off the gas pedal with video, Twitter is pressing right down. We wrote last year about the platform’s renewed push for live video, and it seems that was only the beginning. A post on the company’s blog earlier this month asserted that “video is reshaping digital advertising,” and called out the format’s significant inroads.

“There are around 1.2 billion video views on Twitter each day, which is 2x growth in 12 months according to Twitter internal data,” wrote Liz Alton. “Tweets with video attracted 10x more engagements than Tweets without video. And Promoted Tweets with videos save more than 50% on cost-per-engagement.”

Within the past few weeks, Twitter has rolled out new tools for maximizing video engagement by helping publishers understand which times of day people are most likely to watch, based on historical data. This is helpful info, since the ephemeral nature of Twitter’s feed can make it tough to nail down timing.

The insights are extremely high-level so we can’t necessarily draw specific conclusions about when audience segments (say, the B2B crowd) might be more likely to engage. But it’s a start, and I suspect we’ll only see the platform steepen its commitment to growing out video capabilities for brands.  

LinkedIn: Let’s Do It Live!

Finally, we come to the No. 1 social network for B2B lead gen. LinkedIn has made video a major focus since launching the feature for brands last summer. The big fresh development here is the platform’s brand-new live streaming video service, which debuted in February. “LinkedIn Live” is still in beta form, so it’s not available to everyone, but we can safely assume it will be soon.

In the past, we’ve shared pros, cons, and examples of real-time video for content marketing. The engagement, authenticity, and accessibility are attractive perks, and now marketers will have an opportunity to tap them with more B2B-centric audiences (and deeper professional insights around viewers).

TechCrunch says of LinkedIn’s vision for live video: “the plan is to cover conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by influencers and mentors, office hours from a big tech company, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies and more.” It’s easy to see how B2B audiences would find value in this kind of content, and you might already be seeding ideas for relevant broadcasts in your brain.

The State of Social Media Video for B2B Brands

There’s an old saying that change is the only constant, and it certainly applies for social media. Keeping up with all the pivots and posturing can feel exhausting. Given the relative cost of investing in video content, this is a weighty issue for marketers.

We’re here to help you keep a finger on the pulse of this key tactical area. And while this is all — of course — subject to change, these appear to be the top present takeaways for B2B marketers where social media video is concerned:

Video still drives engagement on Facebook, but the platform’s heightening focus on privacy and direct messaging casts some doubt on the long-term impact. However, now is not the time to call it quits.

Twitter is only increasing its commitment, building out the advertiser’s toolkit after elevating live video last year.

Speaking of live video, it’s coming soon for all brands on LinkedIn, and offers an intriguing assortment of possibilities there for high-value B2B content.

Want more insight on where social media marketing stands today and where it’s heading? Check out some of our recent updates:

Social Media Marketing Benchmarks: What Works & Where to Focus

From Messenger Bots to the Growth of ‘Gram, Social Media Examiner’s Annual Report Reveals Trends to Watch

How to Survive the Social Media Midlife Crisis

*Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing Client.

TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden is on the road again. His next stop? inOrbit 2019 Conference in Portorož, Slovenia on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Learn more here.

The post Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog – TopRank®.

Source link

[samuelpboswell]

Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video?

Modern B2B marketers understand that the key to an effective digital content strategy is meeting customers where they’re at, and giving them what they want. With this in mind, the appeal of social media videos only makes sense. We know that billions of people are on social networks, and we know (or at least research leads us to believe) they want video. Then again, certain developments may cause us to question what we think we know. How meaningful is it, really, if X% of users are watching X% of a video while scrolling through their feeds? And how can we be confident this data is even accurate, after the whole inflated metrics fiasco? If this matter is pressing on your mind, you’re not alone. Social media is an eternally tough nut for B2B marketers to crack. In Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2019 benchmarking report, fellow practitioners called out changes in social media algorithms as the second-biggest issue of importance this year, behind search algorithms. We believe that best answer content is the most reliable way to remain visible amidst Google’s unpredictable shifts. Is video the best answer for enduring social media relevance? To explore that question, let’s dive into the latest news surrounding the three most prominent social platforms for B2B marketers: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn*.

Facebook: Pivoting Once Again?

Not so long ago, Facebook was one of the leading forces behind the “video takeover” movement. In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg was predicting that within five years, he “wouldn’t be surprised if … most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.” It was a natural direction. The engagement metrics for video were stellar, and brands couldn’t help noticing the way this content type was gaining higher placement in the platform’s feed algorithm. But later that same year, the company disclosed a “miscalculation” that led to inflation of video view numbers. This later became the subject of a lawsuit from advertisers, alleging that Facebook knowingly obscured and downplayed this information. And now? Facebook doesn’t seem to be quite as all-in on video as they once were. Earlier this month Zuckerberg laid out his privacy-focused vision for social networking, and talked about private messaging as a central emphasis going forward. The only time video was mentioned in his overview was a reference to “video chat.” Casey Newton of The Verge surmises this “pivot to privacy” will result in diminishing prominence of the News Feed, which would lower the impact of all public-facing content including video. It bears noting that Facebook video isn’t disappearing anytime soon. A recent study found that video posts drive more interaction on the platform than other types, and a product called Facebook Premiere launched late last year, enabling interactive video polls, pre-recorded live broadcasts, and more.

(Source)

At this moment, there’s no reason to abandon video on Facebook. However, the company’s evolving priorities are worth tracking. So too are the movements of their top competitors in the social space...

Twitter: Powering Up Video Analytics and Engagement

As Facebook appears to be taking its foot off the gas pedal with video, Twitter is pressing right down. We wrote last year about the platform’s renewed push for live video, and it seems that was only the beginning. A post on the company’s blog earlier this month asserted that “video is reshaping digital advertising,” and called out the format’s significant inroads. “There are around 1.2 billion video views on Twitter each day, which is 2x growth in 12 months according to Twitter internal data,” wrote Liz Alton. “Tweets with video attracted 10x more engagements than Tweets without video. And Promoted Tweets with videos save more than 50% on cost-per-engagement.” Within the past few weeks, Twitter has rolled out new tools for maximizing video engagement by helping publishers understand which times of day people are most likely to watch, based on historical data. This is helpful info, since the ephemeral nature of Twitter’s feed can make it tough to nail down timing. The insights are extremely high-level so we can’t necessarily draw specific conclusions about when audience segments (say, the B2B crowd) might be more likely to engage. But it’s a start, and I suspect we’ll only see the platform steepen its commitment to growing out video capabilities for brands.  

LinkedIn: Let’s Do It Live!

Finally, we come to the No. 1 social network for B2B lead gen. LinkedIn has made video a major focus since launching the feature for brands last summer. The big fresh development here is the platform’s brand-new live streaming video service, which debuted in February. “LinkedIn Live” is still in beta form, so it’s not available to everyone, but we can safely assume it will be soon. In the past, we’ve shared pros, cons, and examples of real-time video for content marketing. The engagement, authenticity, and accessibility are attractive perks, and now marketers will have an opportunity to tap them with more B2B-centric audiences (and deeper professional insights around viewers). TechCrunch says of LinkedIn’s vision for live video: “the plan is to cover conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by influencers and mentors, office hours from a big tech company, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies and more.” It’s easy to see how B2B audiences would find value in this kind of content, and you might already be seeding ideas for relevant broadcasts in your brain.

The State of Social Media Video for B2B Brands

There’s an old saying that change is the only constant, and it certainly applies for social media. Keeping up with all the pivots and posturing can feel exhausting. Given the relative cost of investing in video content, this is a weighty issue for marketers. We’re here to help you keep a finger on the pulse of this key tactical area. And while this is all — of course — subject to change, these appear to be the top present takeaways for B2B marketers where social media video is concerned:

Video still drives engagement on Facebook, but the platform’s heightening focus on privacy and direct messaging casts some doubt on the long-term impact. However, now is not the time to call it quits.

Twitter is only increasing its commitment, building out the advertiser’s toolkit after elevating live video last year.

Speaking of live video, it’s coming soon for all brands on LinkedIn, and offers an intriguing assortment of possibilities there for high-value B2B content.

Want more insight on where social media marketing stands today and where it’s heading? Check out some of our recent updates:

Social Media Marketing Benchmarks: What Works & Where to Focus

From Messenger Bots to the Growth of ‘Gram, Social Media Examiner’s Annual Report Reveals Trends to Watch

How to Survive the Social Media Midlife Crisis

*Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing Client. TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden is on the road again. His next stop? inOrbit 2019 Conference in Portorož, Slovenia on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Learn more here.

The post Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from The SEO Advantages http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnlineMarketingSEOBlog/~3/lxhb8-Pu_BY/

[befoundonlinemarketing]

Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video?

Modern B2B marketers understand that the key to an effective digital content strategy is meeting customers where they’re at, and giving them what they want. With this in mind, the appeal of social media videos only makes sense. We know that billions of people are on social networks, and we know (or at least research leads us to believe) they want video. Then again, certain developments may cause us to question what we think we know. How meaningful is it, really, if X% of users are watching X% of a video while scrolling through their feeds? And how can we be confident this data is even accurate, after the whole inflated metrics fiasco? If this matter is pressing on your mind, you’re not alone. Social media is an eternally tough nut for B2B marketers to crack. In Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2019 benchmarking report, fellow practitioners called out changes in social media algorithms as the second-biggest issue of importance this year, behind search algorithms. We believe that best answer content is the most reliable way to remain visible amidst Google’s unpredictable shifts. Is video the best answer for enduring social media relevance? To explore that question, let’s dive into the latest news surrounding the three most prominent social platforms for B2B marketers: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn*.

Facebook: Pivoting Once Again?

Not so long ago, Facebook was one of the leading forces behind the “video takeover” movement. In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg was predicting that within five years, he “wouldn’t be surprised if … most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.” It was a natural direction. The engagement metrics for video were stellar, and brands couldn’t help noticing the way this content type was gaining higher placement in the platform’s feed algorithm. But later that same year, the company disclosed a “miscalculation” that led to inflation of video view numbers. This later became the subject of a lawsuit from advertisers, alleging that Facebook knowingly obscured and downplayed this information. And now? Facebook doesn’t seem to be quite as all-in on video as they once were. Earlier this month Zuckerberg laid out his privacy-focused vision for social networking, and talked about private messaging as a central emphasis going forward. The only time video was mentioned in his overview was a reference to “video chat.” Casey Newton of The Verge surmises this “pivot to privacy” will result in diminishing prominence of the News Feed, which would lower the impact of all public-facing content including video. It bears noting that Facebook video isn’t disappearing anytime soon. A recent study found that video posts drive more interaction on the platform than other types, and a product called Facebook Premiere launched late last year, enabling interactive video polls, pre-recorded live broadcasts, and more.

(Source)

At this moment, there’s no reason to abandon video on Facebook. However, the company’s evolving priorities are worth tracking. So too are the movements of their top competitors in the social space...

Twitter: Powering Up Video Analytics and Engagement

As Facebook appears to be taking its foot off the gas pedal with video, Twitter is pressing right down. We wrote last year about the platform’s renewed push for live video, and it seems that was only the beginning. A post on the company’s blog earlier this month asserted that “video is reshaping digital advertising,” and called out the format’s significant inroads. “There are around 1.2 billion video views on Twitter each day, which is 2x growth in 12 months according to Twitter internal data,” wrote Liz Alton. “Tweets with video attracted 10x more engagements than Tweets without video. And Promoted Tweets with videos save more than 50% on cost-per-engagement.” Within the past few weeks, Twitter has rolled out new tools for maximizing video engagement by helping publishers understand which times of day people are most likely to watch, based on historical data. This is helpful info, since the ephemeral nature of Twitter’s feed can make it tough to nail down timing. The insights are extremely high-level so we can’t necessarily draw specific conclusions about when audience segments (say, the B2B crowd) might be more likely to engage. But it’s a start, and I suspect we’ll only see the platform steepen its commitment to growing out video capabilities for brands.  

LinkedIn: Let’s Do It Live!

Finally, we come to the No. 1 social network for B2B lead gen. LinkedIn has made video a major focus since launching the feature for brands last summer. The big fresh development here is the platform’s brand-new live streaming video service, which debuted in February. “LinkedIn Live” is still in beta form, so it’s not available to everyone, but we can safely assume it will be soon. In the past, we’ve shared pros, cons, and examples of real-time video for content marketing. The engagement, authenticity, and accessibility are attractive perks, and now marketers will have an opportunity to tap them with more B2B-centric audiences (and deeper professional insights around viewers). TechCrunch says of LinkedIn’s vision for live video: “the plan is to cover conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by influencers and mentors, office hours from a big tech company, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies and more.” It’s easy to see how B2B audiences would find value in this kind of content, and you might already be seeding ideas for relevant broadcasts in your brain.

The State of Social Media Video for B2B Brands

There’s an old saying that change is the only constant, and it certainly applies for social media. Keeping up with all the pivots and posturing can feel exhausting. Given the relative cost of investing in video content, this is a weighty issue for marketers. We’re here to help you keep a finger on the pulse of this key tactical area. And while this is all — of course — subject to change, these appear to be the top present takeaways for B2B marketers where social media video is concerned:

Video still drives engagement on Facebook, but the platform’s heightening focus on privacy and direct messaging casts some doubt on the long-term impact. However, now is not the time to call it quits.

Twitter is only increasing its commitment, building out the advertiser’s toolkit after elevating live video last year.

Speaking of live video, it’s coming soon for all brands on LinkedIn, and offers an intriguing assortment of possibilities there for high-value B2B content.

Want more insight on where social media marketing stands today and where it’s heading? Check out some of our recent updates:

Social Media Marketing Benchmarks: What Works & Where to Focus

From Messenger Bots to the Growth of ‘Gram, Social Media Examiner’s Annual Report Reveals Trends to Watch

How to Survive the Social Media Midlife Crisis

*Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing Client. TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden is on the road again. His next stop? inOrbit 2019 Conference in Portorož, Slovenia on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Learn more here.

The post Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video? posted first on http://www.toprankblog.com/

[christopheruearle]

Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video?

Modern B2B marketers understand that the key to an effective digital content strategy is meeting customers where they’re at, and giving them what they want. With this in mind, the appeal of social media videos only makes sense. We know that billions of people are on social networks, and we know (or at least research leads us to believe) they want video. Then again, certain developments may cause us to question what we think we know. How meaningful is it, really, if X% of users are watching X% of a video while scrolling through their feeds? And how can we be confident this data is even accurate, after the whole inflated metrics fiasco? If this matter is pressing on your mind, you’re not alone. Social media is an eternally tough nut for B2B marketers to crack. In Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2019 benchmarking report, fellow practitioners called out changes in social media algorithms as the second-biggest issue of importance this year, behind search algorithms. We believe that best answer content is the most reliable way to remain visible amidst Google’s unpredictable shifts. Is video the best answer for enduring social media relevance? To explore that question, let’s dive into the latest news surrounding the three most prominent social platforms for B2B marketers: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn*.

Facebook: Pivoting Once Again?

Not so long ago, Facebook was one of the leading forces behind the “video takeover” movement. In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg was predicting that within five years, he “wouldn’t be surprised if … most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.” It was a natural direction. The engagement metrics for video were stellar, and brands couldn’t help noticing the way this content type was gaining higher placement in the platform’s feed algorithm. But later that same year, the company disclosed a “miscalculation” that led to inflation of video view numbers. This later became the subject of a lawsuit from advertisers, alleging that Facebook knowingly obscured and downplayed this information. And now? Facebook doesn’t seem to be quite as all-in on video as they once were. Earlier this month Zuckerberg laid out his privacy-focused vision for social networking, and talked about private messaging as a central emphasis going forward. The only time video was mentioned in his overview was a reference to “video chat.” Casey Newton of The Verge surmises this “pivot to privacy” will result in diminishing prominence of the News Feed, which would lower the impact of all public-facing content including video. It bears noting that Facebook video isn’t disappearing anytime soon. A recent study found that video posts drive more interaction on the platform than other types, and a product called Facebook Premiere launched late last year, enabling interactive video polls, pre-recorded live broadcasts, and more.

(Source)

At this moment, there’s no reason to abandon video on Facebook. However, the company’s evolving priorities are worth tracking. So too are the movements of their top competitors in the social space...

Twitter: Powering Up Video Analytics and Engagement

As Facebook appears to be taking its foot off the gas pedal with video, Twitter is pressing right down. We wrote last year about the platform’s renewed push for live video, and it seems that was only the beginning. A post on the company’s blog earlier this month asserted that “video is reshaping digital advertising,” and called out the format’s significant inroads. “There are around 1.2 billion video views on Twitter each day, which is 2x growth in 12 months according to Twitter internal data,” wrote Liz Alton. “Tweets with video attracted 10x more engagements than Tweets without video. And Promoted Tweets with videos save more than 50% on cost-per-engagement.” Within the past few weeks, Twitter has rolled out new tools for maximizing video engagement by helping publishers understand which times of day people are most likely to watch, based on historical data. This is helpful info, since the ephemeral nature of Twitter’s feed can make it tough to nail down timing. The insights are extremely high-level so we can’t necessarily draw specific conclusions about when audience segments (say, the B2B crowd) might be more likely to engage. But it’s a start, and I suspect we’ll only see the platform steepen its commitment to growing out video capabilities for brands.  

LinkedIn: Let’s Do It Live!

Finally, we come to the No. 1 social network for B2B lead gen. LinkedIn has made video a major focus since launching the feature for brands last summer. The big fresh development here is the platform’s brand-new live streaming video service, which debuted in February. “LinkedIn Live” is still in beta form, so it’s not available to everyone, but we can safely assume it will be soon. In the past, we’ve shared pros, cons, and examples of real-time video for content marketing. The engagement, authenticity, and accessibility are attractive perks, and now marketers will have an opportunity to tap them with more B2B-centric audiences (and deeper professional insights around viewers). TechCrunch says of LinkedIn’s vision for live video: “the plan is to cover conferences, product announcements, Q&As and other events led by influencers and mentors, office hours from a big tech company, earnings calls, graduation and awards ceremonies and more.” It’s easy to see how B2B audiences would find value in this kind of content, and you might already be seeding ideas for relevant broadcasts in your brain.

The State of Social Media Video for B2B Brands

There’s an old saying that change is the only constant, and it certainly applies for social media. Keeping up with all the pivots and posturing can feel exhausting. Given the relative cost of investing in video content, this is a weighty issue for marketers. We’re here to help you keep a finger on the pulse of this key tactical area. And while this is all — of course — subject to change, these appear to be the top present takeaways for B2B marketers where social media video is concerned:

Video still drives engagement on Facebook, but the platform’s heightening focus on privacy and direct messaging casts some doubt on the long-term impact. However, now is not the time to call it quits.

Twitter is only increasing its commitment, building out the advertiser’s toolkit after elevating live video last year.

Speaking of live video, it’s coming soon for all brands on LinkedIn, and offers an intriguing assortment of possibilities there for high-value B2B content.

Want more insight on where social media marketing stands today and where it’s heading? Check out some of our recent updates:

Social Media Marketing Benchmarks: What Works & Where to Focus

From Messenger Bots to the Growth of ‘Gram, Social Media Examiner’s Annual Report Reveals Trends to Watch

How to Survive the Social Media Midlife Crisis

*Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing Client. TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden is on the road again. His next stop? inOrbit 2019 Conference in Portorož, Slovenia on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Learn more here.

The post Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.