Mission Impossible 6: Fallout: Better (These Days) Than Bond

Just saw the 6th Mission Impossible movie - Fallout - with Tom Cruise in the lead role as Ethan Hunt.  I thought it was outstanding - the best of the movies so far - and, yes, better than the Bond movies these days.

The dominant philosophic theme was a refutation of the utilitarian principle that the good of the many outweigh, or should outweigh, the good of the few as a motive for action.   We see this refuted at least three times in the movie, which begins with Hunt blowing a mission to save one of his team.  He later takes precious time to make sure that a French woman police officer survives a deadly encounter.  And in the one of the scenes in the movie, Ilsa struggles with whether to thoroughly choke out an arch villain while Benji dangles from a nearby noose and looses consciousness.

There's some excellent double-agent moves in which good guys turn out to be bad guys and vice versa.  And the action scenes - in bathrooms in Paris to cliffs in Kashmir - are top-notch and in some ways better than usual.   In the bathroom, a single bad guy gets the better of both Hunt and another agent, until - well, I don't want to give too much away.  But that's more realistic than we often see in scenes like this.

There's the best balance of tongue-in-cheekness about Mission Impossible tropes and using them to effective purpose in the narrative.   An early scene features Wolf Blitzer delivering a news report on CNN.  I had a feeling he was making up the report for MI purposes, but didn't guess that he was actually one of the MI team wearing a Wolf Blitzer mask.  After that, the cracks by disbelievers that the MI strategy of masks which just Halloween had an especially delicious irony.

Tom Cruise, I have to say,  did another fine job.  I never got the criticism of Cruise in this or any other role.  He delivers his Ethan Hunt character with just the right mix of grit, determination, self-awareness, and even self-deprecation.    I guess comparing these MI movies to Bond is apples and oranges.   But I will say that I liked Fallout more than last few Bond moves, which were certainly good cinema.

See also:  Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol

the Sierra Waters time-travel trilogy

Betty White as Old Media/New New Media Symbiosis

I was interviewed by E! Online yesterday about whether I thought Betty White - who everyone including me was saying was hilarious on Saturday Night Live this past Saturday night - was really that funny, or was she just "getting an old-lady pass" because she is 88 years old?  My answer was that she has enormous talent, which indeed came across even funnier because of her age.   An 88-year old using raunchy language breaks the norm, and will therefore always be funnier than a 28-year old saying the same thing.  (For the same reason, little kids cursing are funnier than adults.   Think of the the Balloon Boy asking "Who the hell is Wolf?" about CNN interviewer Wolf Blitzer in October 2009.)


But there's an additional very important lesson in the new success of Betty White: it's a vivid example of old media/new new media symbiosis, a key component of the relationship of new new media to older media such as television that is discussed in New New Media.  In Betty White's case, she was first a television star, years ago, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and then on the Golden Girls.  She appeared in a great 2010 Superbowl commercial for Snickers with octogenarian Abe Vigoda.  These are impressive old media successes.  But, most importantly for the current Betty White wave,  they motivated the formation of a Facebook group to get Betty White to host Saturday Night Live.


This new new media push resulted in Betty White hosting Saturday Night Live, which, because she was so funny on the show, in turn has led to calls for Betty White to host the Oscars, Carol Burnett to host Saturday Night Live, etc.   Facebook is the engine of all of these.   In addition, then, to this being an example of television-Facebook hybridization, Betty White's new success also demonstrates another fundamental principle of new new media: consumers becoming producers, in this case, programming television via Facebook.


Betty White is not only old and funny, she has become an archetypal example of old/new new media partnership.

MSNBC Runs Canned "Doc Bloc" As Mumbai Burns

I was just looking for a few minutes at MSNBC. You know what they were reporting? Nothing, really. From 6-8PM, and who knows how much longer today, MSNBC had on its canned "Caught on Camera," with footage of events that happened years ago.

Over on CNN, Wolf Blizter in the Situation Room was doing a superb job of reporting on the Mumbai Massacre, with interviews of survivors, discussion of what this means for world security with former Secretary of Defense William Cohen and other terrorism experts, and detailed information on the heart-rending story of Brooklyn Rabbi Gabriel Holzberg and his wife, murdered along with three other Jewish people at the Chabad Lubavitch. His two-year old had escaped with their brave housekeeper. Canadian Jonathan Ehrlich, who managed to escape from another one of the terrorist targets, one of the attacked hotels, also gave a poignant interview on CNN.

Fox News did an ok job of reporting, as well, on the still ongoing September 11th for India - though I did spot a rerun of O'Reilly on Fox tonight.

But what can MSNBC have been thinking? They have wasted our time, and driven away viewers interested in real news, for years with their "doc-blocs". They had the good sense in the recently concluded coverage of the 2008 Presidential campaign to greatly expand their political coverage. But who at programming was asleep at the switch at MSNBC today?

MSNBC will never maintain a leading position as a cable news source, or even be taken seriously, if they put "Caught on Camera" or any doc-bloc programming ahead of covering ongoing world catastrophes.

Added December 1, 2008: Check out and join, if you like, the Facebook group I just created: Stop the Doc Bloc on MSNBC. Wield the power of new new media to change television!

See also similar sentiments by Lionel on Air America and David Zurawik at the Baltimore Sun.

Added December 29, 2009: See also Media Coverage and Government Response to Terrorism in the Christmas Skies and MSNBC criticized on coverage

Hologram of Jessica Yellin on CNN Last Night - I Saw Something Like This in 1979

How many of you saw Wolf Blitzer interviewing Jessica Yellin's hologram in CNN's coverage of the election returns last night? I you didn't, check it out below.

We've come a long way since Princess Leia in Star Wars. Back then, I wrote in my doctoral dissertation, "Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media" (1979), that "the third dimensional will replace the two dimensional image as surely and completely as color replaced black-and-white, and talkies replaced silent movies" (p. 282). But it's been a long time in coming - first developed back in 1949, we've seen holograms on credit cards and as special effects in movies. How close are we to seeing it a regular basis on television?

The better question is, how long will be it before our very televisions and movies and web screens are three dimensional - which show people, like Jessica Yellin, from all 360 degrees, from back, sides, and front, as she was standing there and talking to Wolf Blitzer in person?

High-definition television has taken us a big step closer, because the hologram needs a much better resolution of image than our older television screens provide. Fiber optic bandwidth increase has also been an important step towards holographic TV. But predicting the advent of a new medium in specific years is always a risky undertaking - the fax was invented back in the 1800s, and didn't become a major player in media until in the 1980s.

But, sooner or later, holography will be here. As I explain in my "anthropotropic" theory of media evolution, we invent technologies that communicate for us in increasingly human ways. Thus, as the above quote says, photography has evolved from black-and-white to color, silent to talking, still to moving - after all, we see in color, almost always hear some sound when we're looking at something, and the world is in motion. And just as dramatically as all that has happened, we will someday have holography for everything we see in our living rooms and on our desks and in the devices we carry and hold in our hands. The third dimensional is already part of our perception of the world. (See Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media and The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution for more.)

In the meantime, here's Jessica Yellin ...



PS - added a few hours after the above -

Some people on Gizmodo and elsewhere are claiming that the Yellin appearance (and also a dance done on CNN by Wil.i.am) were not "really" holograms.

Here's the gist of the response I posted:

About the CNN holograms being "real" or not:

First, there of course were no three dimensional images walking around out of the screen in anyone's living room. So if that's what anyone means by saying no way these were holograms, that's of course correct.

But if we're referring to the fact that Blitzer was talking to an empty stage - not the hologram of Yellin - then I think what we saw can still be correctly called a hologram. We saw a three dimensional image within the TV frame, talking to the flesh-and-blood Blitzer. That image was still a hologram for us, the viewer, regardless of what Blitzer saw or didn't see.

Or, put otherwise, I don't see a meaningful difference between a hologram on a stage broadcast on TV, and a blank stage in which three dimensional information is synched into the broadcast from another source and looks three-dimensional on the 2-D screen at home.

Or, put additionally otherwise, I see no meaningful distinction in this context between (i) an illusion of an illusion or hologram and (ii) an illusion or hologram - no difference between (i) an illusion of an illusion and (ii) an illusion.

Marshall McLuhan and Barack Obama: Medium is the Message in this Presidential Campaign?

I was just interviewed by Mark Austin Thomas in my regular Sunday spot on KNX 1070 all-news radio out of Southern California - about what happened to Barack Obama in Thursday's Presidential debate.

It is generally agreed by observers, including me, that Obama did not do well in the debate. He certainly had some excellent moments - I thought his lecture to Wolf Blitzer that we shouldn't just accept the current technological options for energy was memorable - but, in general, he seemed not on top of his game, certainly not as much as in command as Hillary Clinton. But only a few days before, Obama gave the speech of his life in Iowa - electrifying his audience and building upon Hillary Clinton's weak performance in the previous debate.

Did Obama just have a bad night?

For better or worse, it's likely something more profound - a refection of something Marshall McLuhan famously pointed out back in the 1960s: the medium is the message.

What McLuhan noticed is that the means of communication can often have decisive impact on the message we receive. Obama clearly wanted to deliver the same message in the Thursday debate as in his Iowa speech. But he clearly is more comfortable giving speeches than standing up on stage with a group of candidates and answering a question every now and then.

Does this mean that Obama would not make a good President, or a weaker President than Hillary Clinton?

Of course not. Historians tell us that Abraham Lincoln had a voice that sounded more Truman Capote than Henry Fonda. Fortunately for America, there was no radio or television back then.

The enormous amount of exposure that our mass media, especially television, give to Presidential contenders is by and large a very good thing. Democracy operates best on a maximum of information. But we need to recognize that the way that information is presented - the forum in which it is offered - can often speak far more loudly than what it is the candidates are saying.

Obama Has Best Line in Democratic Debate on CNN

Well, the self described "best" team of political commentators on CNN said Hillary Clinton had the best night in the Democratic Presidents debates in Las Vegas just concluded, but I disagree.

Hillary was indeed excellent, and did have memorable lines - most notably that the other Democratic contenders are ganging up on her not because she's a woman, but because she's ahead - but I thought the best line belonged to Obama, and certainly has the most important meaning for the future:

Pressed by Wolf Blitzer about energy choices - in particular, the problems of disposing nuclear waste - Obama insisted that he and the American people not be bound by the confines of current technology. Obama challenged Blitzer to think big, and have an open mind as to what we could do to technologically improve our energy situation in the future.

Maybe it's because I'm an historian of technology, maybe it's because I'm a science fiction writer, but I found Obama's point very profound and indeed crucial to improving our future.

Meanwhile, in general, the debate was about the strongest we've seen among the Democrats, so far. And, although I don't agree with some of Hillary Clinton's positions - especially her Senate vote declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard "terrorist" (the last thing we should do is give the Bush administration any more license for military action) - I was moved by what she said about what her election would mean for women in America. It is long since time that a woman was President of this country, and, although Hillary Clinton is far from perfect, her election would be revolutionary and healthy if for no other reason than she is a woman.

So perhaps Hillary Clinton did slow Barack Obama down a bit tonight. Debates are clearly not Obama's medium - he gives much better speeches at rallies than answers at debates. Edwards and the other Democratic candidates were fine, as usual, but did not light any new fires. Kucinich can indeed lay claim to being against the war, and on the best side of the important issues, from the very beginning. In a better world, he would be at least among the top three candidates running for the Democratic nomination for President.