Culture

I, Toward a Metrics of Me

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In the interest of full self-disclosure, what follows will disclose nothing about me.

I am a Twitterer. I Tweet. Once a year or so, I will participate in the nightly cocktail party, the veritable Algonquin Round Table, of online wordplay and games that can be found on that social media outlet. Perhaps you’ve seen these games, in which people follow the instruction given in a catchy hashtag, like hashtag (which is this symbol: #) “Add A Word Ruin A Movie.” As in: #AddAWordRuinAMovie. And then a participant, me let us say, will snarkily add a word to a famous movie title to ironically change the entire complexion of the movie. “Midnight in the Olive Garden of Good and Evil” is one that I love but can not claim credit for.

One day last year, the wit-fest of hashtag joking, the hive mind of Twitter intellect, had come up with #DrabFilms, and this was my contribution, and it was met with universal silence:

Not one single re-Tweet on there. Not one “favorite.” Bupkiss.

There is little in the world sadder or lonelier than a one-liner delivered to no one in a crowded room crammed with people ignoring the joke-maker’s contributions. “If a Tweet falls in a forest,” someone philosophically minded might ask, “with no one to re-Tweet it, did it make a sound? Nay, did it even exist?” (There are a handful of congressmen who might have their own answers to this question.)

“I Tweet, therefore I know that I am doing what I told you I am doing once I tell you what I am doing because others tell me that they say that they approve.”

Do I know what I am doing, where I have been, where I am going, who I am with—who I am, even?—without social verification, approval, disapproval, a certain number of thumbs-ups or stars or re-Tweets?

The American corporate world introduced the idea of measuring everything many decades ago but in the late 1990s employees discovered that their continued employment was dependent on finding new ways to measure everything. I remember my revulsion upon hearing the word “metrics” used in a sentence the first time. (For months, I heard the ghost-word “system” every time I heard “metric.”) The precise sentence was, “We are using all available metrics,” and I quickly noticed that no one else at the meeting table was laughing and they were still scribbling notes more furiously than students in a freshman philosophy seminar. For a while, the number of documents I was actively working on was my key metric, I was told by my employer. Then it was the total number of pages. It changed, often, but the accumulated number of metrics used to measure my metrics was never itself added up and counted. For a year or two I was publishing the average number of pages per document completed. Then it was pages per document per day.

Some time after that one, I was let go. A bad attitude has no metrics.

The social media revolution was long in coming and I enjoy it very much, but metrics have infiltrated our lives, even our fun-filled social lives. “How many ‘likes’ did that get?” Does my employment hinge on it? No? Why does it feel like it does?

When a celebrity or otherwise important person finds him or herself in an online controversy, the number of re-Tweets of the news-worthy posting is supplied in news accounts about the contretemps. The fact that a number is available and can be reported does not make it a statistic, much less a statistic worth reporting.

Sadly, I find myself watching the likes and numbers of visits to this web site right here, the one in your hands, every night. “The Gad About Town” is not my employment, it is something I want to do and share. But the fine people at WordPress make the information so easy to find and digest. It is information after all and it looks like an impressive collection of live statistics and it makes me want to have a boss to report it to every night. (So I Tweet it out sometimes, to attract more readers.) “This number of visitors read my work last night, but it is a smaller number tonight. Whycome is that, world?” Sad face.

(Sigh.) Metrics.

Never before in my life have I known how many friends I have, but if I wanted to, I could look and see every morning if the number of my online friends is larger or smaller than yesterday’s. Metrics.

Am I my numbers? Am I my metrics of me? Everything in the world can be counted, and that number can be known and disclosed, but more often than not this one fact does not make it information.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 1 asks, “To be, to have, to think, to move—which of these verbs is the one you feel most connected to? Or is there another verb that characterizes you better?” I Tweet.

Daily Prompt: Unasked Questions

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“AMA” no longer stands for the “American Medical Association” or “Ameliorating My Attitude.” (Never heard of that one? Neither have I. It doesn’t exist.) In our Twitterverse and Redditworld, AMA is now the acronym for “Ask Me Anything.”

And we can. Even Pope Francis (yes, THAT pope) has a Twitter account, @Pontifex, as does the Dalai Lama, other religious figures, and every politician. Or at least their offices have Twitter accounts. Here is a recent papal Tweet:

The sentiment may be true enough, but what stands out is that the pope gets a lot more retweets than I do. This is irking, as I have been on Twitter (@MarkSAldrich) for far longer.

For the last few years, public figures from the president to famous actors have scheduled AMA sessions on Reddit, on Facebook, and on Twitter, the start of which is usually announced with a photo of the famous person holding a handwritten sign stating “Ask Me Anything” and the day’s date. The “holding a sign” part often makes the famous person look a bit like a hostage. Like poor Bill Gates (well, those three words do not often appear in that particular sequence!) here:

reddit-600x303

In the old days of any time before now, if one wanted to ask a famous person a question, one had two available methods: A. Study and work very hard and become famous oneself and learn to befriend other famous people, one of whom is the person you always wanted to ask something, anything. Sidle up to that famous person and say something like, “You know, I have always wanted to ask you something. In fact, I worked and studied very hard to become famous myself and I became famous and I became friends with you just so I could ask you something. And now I do not remember what it was. What an amazing short story this would make! More caviar?” B. Write them a letter, purchase a stamp, place the letter in an envelope and the stamp outside the envelope, mail it and hope to receive a reply.

Somewhere, my mother has a scrapbook filled with autographed photos of Hollywood celebrities of the 1950s; in some rare cases the movie star hand-wrote a note of thanks. I do not believe she “asked them anything” personal, so she did not receive any news making replies. (Luckily, she did not have this mailman working in her neighborhood: “Brooklyn Postal Worker Arrested for Not Delivering a Decade’s Worth of Mail.“)

Part of the appeal to the contemporary social media “ask me anything” sessions, and to the fact that many famous actors and writers and some famous politicians personally work on their Twitter/Facebook accounts and reply to us everyday sorts, is to be impertinent to them. Call it the “BaBaBooey Effect.” This is the opposite to the “Access Is Everything” attitude which we sometimes see in the press, the “‘Meet the Press’ Effect,” in which reporters whose employment depends on continued access to important people do not ask difficult, impertinent, questions, questions that might make the important person cut off future access. People who are not reporters might shout a verbal graffito (“Bababooey”) and make some noise, become a part of the story. They are easily ignored, but so are the Sunday morning talk shows, on which news is rarely found or broken.

Instead, news is more often broken when a reporter who knows that he or she will lose access to a famous news maker if they in fact ask them anything, goes ahead and asks that one question. Or when, as with shows like “60 Minutes,” the show reports on some shady business whose practices are worth exposing by sending a national reporter who will not face backballing in his or her own neighborhood because he or she exposed a neighbor’s shady business practices, like a local reporter would.

Early in my brief local newspaper reporting career, I actually heard this from the sidewalk below my second-floor apartment: “We can’t talk here. I see the light on in that hack’s room.” That felt like a huge compliment coming as it did from someone I was publicly writing about. “I’m a hack! I’ve made it.” Then I thought, “How does he know where I live?”

It was a criminal matter I was writing about, after all. But given one question to ask one person, I might go back in time to that night and yell out my window, “How do you know where I live?”

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 26 tells us, “You’ve been given the opportunity to send one message to one person you wouldn’t normally have access to (for example: the President. Kim Kardashian. A coffee grower in Ethiopia). Who’s the person you choose, and what’s the message?”

How to Be a Live TV Audience

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Comedy Central’s two main franchise shows are both recorded in a part of New York City called “Hell’s Kitchen,” a section of Manhattan that extends about 25 blocks south and west of Central Park and west of Midtown over to the Hudson River. Most of the buildings in the neighborhood are former walk-ups and townhouses that are now offices for media companies; “The Colbert Report’s” studio looks like it was a house or storefront once upon a time.

The Thursday, September 18, 2014, broadcast of “The Colbert Report” was a very special one because I was in the audience, as I wrote yesterday, in “Four Minutes and 24 Years.” Terry Gilliam, the legendary film and theater director (the list is epic and includes: “Time Bandits,” “Brazil,” “The Fisher King,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Zero Theorem”) and Monty Python animator and cast member, was the guest.

The studio is on the same level as the street outside, but it takes a lifetime to get there. Sorry, that was a sentence from a television ad for a college course in broadcasting that I am working on. We should go back outside.

The tickets for live-on-tape broadcasts are free, because these shows need a full and loudly enthusiastic house for each and every show and the producers do not want people who feel that sense of hostile proprietorship that can come with a ticket purchase. (They do not want an audience of people with crossed arms and an attitude of, “Entertain me.”) A theatrical performance in front of an empty house could nonetheless be great but a television show performed to silence and a performer feeding off the silence could be horrifying to watch unfold. (Only Johnny Carson seemed to be able to work with a not-yet-impressed audience.)

The producers also do not want an audience of people off the street, happy to receive free things, but not aware of how to be an audience. Talk with a stage actor sometime. He or she will tell you stories of the weirdest things that have happened during performances: cell phones going off, of course, but also people taking the phone call; people walking across the stage (especially in theaters with the stage and seats on the same level) looking for a restroom; audience members yelling at or asking questions of the characters as if they are in their easy chair yelling at a TV screen; babies crying. The audience is supposed to be separate from the performance, with some exceptions. A live television show audience is not at a stage show; the audience is a part of the show: the audience is the soundtrack.

Thus, the audience is coached on this point by producers before the taping begins. And then re-coached. The performance at first felt like a pop quiz to gauge how well we had absorbed the coaching. It also felt like if we were insufficiently enthusiastic, we would be escorted back out to 54th Street.

The process of acquiring these free tickets varies from show to show but all of the shows use the method to establish that the audience is made up of fans. (Willing to be loud. Happy to pretend to not be faking enthusiasm.) Some shows use online trivia contests to winnow out the casual fans. My method was the easiest for me: I have a friend who has done this before (he attended “The Daily Show”) and wanted to do it again and invited me.

(Would that we had attended “The Daily Show” last Thursday; former President Clinton was there that day.)

The tickets one receives for registering online for a television taping are not tickets as one usually thinks of them. They do not guarantee a seat. They guarantee a spot on line, in a covered alleyway where one waits for the doors to open. We arrived early, chatted with the show assistants, and waited some more. The assistants are talented at a particular task: they quickly learn who is with whom, names, who has special needs. My friend’s wife sat with me at a coffeeshop for a few minutes while he held our group spot on line, then they traded: she went back and he sat with me. When he and I rejoined the line we found that we could not see her; one of the assistants got our attention (not vice versa, They. Ran. Us. Down), gave us our seat tickets, and ushered us into a room in the building, where she already was.

My thumb.

My thumb.

In that room, one goes through a security checkpoint and then waits. For over an hour. It is a square room, maybe 25 X 25 feet, extraordinarily air conditioned. Several monitors play old Colbert shows on a “Best of” loop. The walls are plastered with Colbert memorabilia. Over the next few minutes, the entire audience-to-be was herded into this room, which made clear the need for extreme air conditioning. Seeing I walk with a cane, one assistant walked me through the crowd to a bench.

Twice an assistant addressed the crowd. Both times the message was: “This is very special. Stephen is going to chat with you before the show, so have some questions ready.” (Perhaps he does this every show and they tell the audience it is special.) “When you’re watching the show at home, you only chuckle at the jokes because you’re thinking about your own life and you hear the audience in your TV laughing uproariously. You’re the audience in someone’s TV now. Whatever you’re going to laugh at, laugh loudly.”

The doors to the set were opened and people were ushered in by ticket number but in small groups; my group of four friends went in together. The bleachers do not have banisters, something which I was anxious about as a person with spinal muscular atrophy and thus almost no balance on stairs, even with a death grip on a railing. One of the assistants saw my cane and the four of us were thus seated in the front, over by the interview table. The stage manager and then the warm-up act coached us some more in the finer points of yelling our laughter. (Since all of you have heard my voice in an earlier post, you should be able to hear me clearly if you watch the show. Of course.)

Contrary to what I thought, the show is not taped in real time; Colbert made one verbal typo and they recorded a do-over, the commercial breaks were over ten minutes each, the interview with Terry Gilliam was over 15 minutes, of which about not quite 10 made the show. The affection between Colbert and his staff was obvious: at one point, while a hairdresser was combing his hair, he started pretending to comb hers. He indeed took questions before the show and again after. All told, we were in the studio for a bit over an hour for a 21-minute show.

The broadcast will be available for free on the website for the rest of this week, so here is the link: The Colbert Report with Terry Gilliam. And here is the 60 second edit:

It was a fun day and night in NYC, thanks to Gerry, Theresa, Ron, Bob and Kevin, and all of New York City. Even the panhandler on the train from Secaucus.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for April 9 asks, “If you could learn a trade—say carpentry, electrical work, roofing, landscaping, plumbing, flooring, drywall—you name it—what skill(s) would you love to have in your back pocket?” TV host. I am heading to NYC today with my one and only, Jen, to view tonight’s taping of “The Nightly Show,” starring Larry Wilmore. It is in the same theater as “The Colbert Report” was recorded each night. That is the reason for re-running this column from September. Tune in tonight at 11:30 EST on Comedy Central to see if you catch a glimpse of me and my love. Full updates tomorrow.