TedPage: Festival of Books

This weekend I went to the Festival of Books up on the UCLA campus. It was a fun event, and an excuse to spend sometime outside in the beautiful weather. Of course, I took pictures, you can expect them online sometime in... probably 2006. There were tons of book vendors and publishers there; from the crazy liberal to the moderate liberal, what else do you expect in California? They also had several panel and author presentations, a few of which I went to.

Brave New World: Monopoly, Media, & the Right to Know

This discussion basically boiled down to a discussion of the changing media landscape between new media (blogs and the Internet) and old media (network news and printed newspapers). All of the panelists thought that news was changing its face to the average American, but how fast, what it means, and why was definitely up for debate. Several interesting facts and observations came out of the discussion.

One of the facts that seems to be effecting news today is how it is becoming increasingly corporate. The reality is that corporations want to play it safe, they don't want to be tagged anything disagreeable so they will avoid stories that offend large segments of viewership. When politicians have 70% approval ratings, media companies are unwilling to run exposes that offend that large a segment of the potential market. An example is how the Los Angeles Times got labeled as "Anti-Arnold" when it ran stories that uncovered negative details about the now Governor Schwarzenegger. This made his supporters (he won handily) disfavor the newspaper.

One statistic that was used to support this was that when the state of California's population was 19 million, there were 900,000 subscribers to the LA Times. Now that the population of the state is over 30 million, there are still 900,000 subscribers. People are looking to different sources to find their news. Hugh Hewitt believed that they were looking for more conservative sources of news like the Wall Street Journal (to which an audience member yelled out War Street Journal -- gotta love California). I'm not sure that that's the case. It seems like more Americans are turning away from traditional sources of news, and to sources like The Daily Show.

Americans used to get 90% of their news from the big three network news programs, now that number is closer to 40%. An interesting point that was derived from this statistic is that the American public used to have a common set of 'facts' from which to make decisions. Now, there is no common understanding, and in fact this makes the entire country more fractured in its outlook at the world. I thought that this was an interesting perspective into how politics are today, everyone is avoiding truly understanding the other side, they don't have to anymore. But, it was also brought up that even in the editorial section of the newspaper, people tend to read the columns of who they agree with (and have for generations).

A point that Ken Auletta made is that investigative reporting is expensive. It takes a lot of money to allow a reporter to go off for several months investigating a story, and even more to leave that reporter in an international location for months at a time. With increasing demand on news rooms to maintain a profit margin, it becomes harder and harder to justify those expenses; but, this is the kind of money that bloggers don't have. If we are going to get truly in depth reporting on complex issues, someone has to spend the money.

Something that Arianna Huffington kept saying was that she loved blogs because they were so "obsessive" (I think she meant persistent). She loved the fact that in the blogosphere, people don't forget that Wolfowitz said the war in Iraq would pay for itself. She was disgusted how the mainstream media just ignored the fact and ate the government line. I thought it was interesting, and I think I almost prefer "obsessive" when describing blogs.

Of course, any discussion of the media today brings up the War in Iraq and the Bush Whitehouse. One comment that I hadn't thought about was that: "The Bush Whitehouse doesn't believe that the media represents the people anymore." Which is an interesting thought. One one hand, I'd have to agree that ABC, CBS and NBC have squandered the public trust; but who else should question the President? Congress doesn't seem to be doing a very good job. I doubt he's worried about condemnation from my blog. The feedback simply isn't there, we need to figure this out.

Kevin Smith

I can't say that I learned nearly as much from Kevin Smith, but I laughed much harder. I'm surprised that they didn't move him a little bit farther away from the kid's area, his sole prepared material was reading a letter from Hustler. All in all, seems like a fun guy to just hang out with, of course, you'll have to turn your sensitivity meter up a little bit first.

Jared Diamond

After reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steal I was very impressed, and was interested to go to his presentation. The presentation was mostly about his newest work, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Collapse is about how civilizations collapse, and he found that most were after destroying the environment in which they lived. For most ancient times, this was through deforestation, through that was not the only factor in their demise.

One case study he presented was that of Easter Island. There, an advanced civilization had lived, but eventually destroyed itself. The biggest reason for this was through removing forests, and thus they were unable to fish without canoes. When he presented this to his students (he's a professor of Geography at UCLA) they asked: What was the person who cut down the last tree thinking when it happened? While no one can really answer that question, he said that many of his students have hypothesized the answer: "Your environmental models are incorrect, we need to study this further", "Protecting the environment isn't my problem" and "Do not worry, God will provide for us".

One of the things that surprised me in the discussions was the first question, from a African-American, about how he felt that Africa wasn't given a fair shake in Guns, Germs and Steal. This was funny to me, because I found one of the underlying themes of the book to be an attack on racism. It felt like that was one of Diamond's goals. Now, I don't expect a liberal professor from California to hurt the recruiting of the KKK, but I do believe that he laid a significant amount of evidence down to discredit any intellectual basis for racism.

When Diamond was talking about societies that succeed, one thing he mentioned was the ability to reevaluate core values of the society. People must look at their values and change. (When talking about the Norse in Greenland he described them a "hopelessly conservative", which got a laugh) One value that he thought must change in America was consumerism. Coupled with the fact that an average American uses 32 times the natural resources of a member of the third world, it seems pretty obvious that the resource usage is unsustainable. But, I'm curious if we don't just have to move our consumerism from things like furniture to temporal collections like ring-tones.

Conclusion

Wonderful event. I got the chance to walk around in the beautiful weather, take pictures, and listen to interesting speakers. It gave me a new perspective: all the time that I was in Arizona I was constantly surrounded by everything conservative, at the festival, I got to see the ugly side of liberal too. It's kinda fun being in a state where I can be called a conservative.