In 1937, Irna Phillips, underwritten by General Mills, began scripting a 45-minute block of three quarter-hour serial dramas for NBC Radio. The General Mills Hour, broadcast weekdays at 2pm, ran for nearly a decade on NBC before its sponsor pulled the plug in 1946. But one of those three dramas was popular enough for CBS to pick up just months later. And after a few more years on the radio it was transformed into a television program in 1952.

72 years after its first radio broadcast, Guiding Light’s run has come to an end. Sadly, after 15,762 episodes, hundreds of marriages, half as many divorces, countless deaths, resurrections to match, and at least one cloning, Guiding Light will broadcast its last episode today, making it the longest scripted drama in the history of broadcast media. A single serial drama, no less. To put that into perspective, stitch together all 15,762 episodes into a contiguous story and what you’re essentially left with is, well…

Humanity’s longest fictional work is arguably a soap opera created to sell baking flour and breakfast cereal.¹

In an interview with 60 Minutes, when asked by Morley Safer “What makes [Guiding Light characters] so real to so many people?”, actress Beth Chamberlin responded “Because they’ve watched, oftentimes, our birth, our marriage… and then our deaths.” That Guiding Light aired long enough for its characters to effectively age at the same pace as its actors (and the audience) is pretty remarkable. Some cast members starred on Guiding Light for over two decades. Some fans claim to have been watching for even longer. I can’t imagine there’s any other work of art or entertainment that’s been experienced that way–over such a long period of time, by so many people.

As it turns out, longevity isn’t Guiding Light’s only accomplishment. In 1938, Irna Phillips helped publish a companion book that explored the program’s backstory, making The Guiding Light one of the earliest, if not the first work of transmedia fiction. (Not to mention between 1952 and 1956 The Guiding Light was recorded twice a day–once for radio and once for television.) Phillips was also the first to explore character crossovers; she scripted characters to move freely between The Guiding Light, Today’s Children, and Women in White–the three dramas of The General Mills Hour.

For a soap opera, it’s got a lot going for it. Not to get sentimental about a television show I’ve never watched, but it sorta sucks no one can figure out a way to keep the story going.

¹Stacked up against the world’s longest novels: Henry Darger’s 10-volume The Story of the Vivian Girls is only 15,145 typed pages; Guiding Light ran for 15,762 episodes. Beyond that, Marienbad My Love, at 17-million words, is computer generated–that doesn’t count. And 11-million word The Blah Story? Total gimmick.

Stills from the Tron: Legacy trailer. And yes, Daft Punk is scoring the film. Serious.

There was a time (likely just before my college years) when I distinctly remember thinking “you know, the music I’m into now, I could just listen to nothing but this for the rest of my life, I mean, it’s that good.” (it was high school) No doubt I wasn’t the first to pledge such lifelong musical satisfaction. And not unlike myself, the musically-satisfied lives of my predecessors probably lasted like… what? A couple months?

Or maybe not. Maybe everyone is still listening to the same crap (excuse me, I mean music) they listened to in high school or college or whatever (I’m sure it’s still very good and not dated at all). And maybe I was the very first to anull my I-never-need-to-listen-to-new-music-again vows, because, like, the next day the Internet started getting really good at dumping piles of the stuff on my head. And then computers started getting really good at helping people make even more music and, hell, now there’s an awful lot of it.

So wait… what was I talking about?

I guess the point to all this is that I’ve listened to A LOT of music over the last 10 or so years. And I like to think I have, you know, REFINED MUSICAL TASTE; which under some sort arithmetic property means there’s A LOT of music out there that’s actually pretty good. Which probably means there’s A WHOLE LOT of music that’s actually really bad. And so, yeah the point to all this is that there’s a MASSIVE amount of recorded music out there, you know? No, hold on, that wasn’t my point.

There’s this pop-urbanism factoid people like to throw around in discussions about cities, architecture and the such: as of 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas. (Many mistakenly substitute “urban area” with “city”, not the same thing.) Well I’m thinking we’re about to, or will shortly, pass the mp3 equivalent of that urban event-horizon. Something like: By the end of 2009, there will be more recorded music than any human can listen to in a lifetime of uninterrupted listening.

Apple’s iTunes Music Store is estimated to have over 10 million songs in it’s (incomplete) catalog. Assuming the average song length is somewhere around 3.5 minutes, that’s 35 million minutes of music. On the other side of the scale, an 80 year life weighs in at a little over 45 million minutes.

Soundtrack for your life, indeed…

It sorta blows my mind how much “old music” college students will be sifting through 25 years from now on their broadband dormitory Internet connections. In 25 years, there will probably be well over twice the amount of recorded music there is today. And 75 years from now, forget it… we’ll be thinking of The Beatles and Britney Spears as contemporaries. And, hey, 75 years is not that far off. That’s still feasibly in my lifetime. So if you wanna get right down to it, this whole recorded music thing is just in it’s infancy. I mean, 75 years, just think how much recorded music there’s gonna be. An f’ing lot, you know?

Which bring a few things to mind: First, how on earth will anyone intelligibly navigate through all that music? Second, will the newness of new music draw much attention when there’s 100 million minutes of old music to listen to? And finally, what’s the role of the record label in this future?

Anyhow. Maybe I’ll dive into some of these questions later.

The photos are from a film about the world’s largest record collection:

Unbeknownst to the throngs of iPhone owners bitching and moaning on their tech blogs and micro-messages over AT&T’s poor wireless service, the telecom giant has a much bigger problem, the most French of business problems, one which has led thousands of suburban middle managers to buy their first steel-toed work boots: impending union strike.¹

On August 7, 1983 the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) began a 22-day strike against AT&T. The strike marked the last time the two unions, which at the time represented 700,000 AT&T employees, were able to collectively bargain for all it’s workers. Months later on January 1, 1984, the decade-old anti-trust suit, United States v. AT&T, culminated in the divestment of the national monopoly into seven regional “Baby Bells”, fragmenting with it the unionized workforce.

26 years and 3 mergers later (the most recent in 2005), AT&T now constitutes four of the original seven holding companies. Through this slow process of re-monopilization, AT&Ts national footprint has grown considerably, and with it the CWA and IBEW’s bargaining leverage over AT&T. Albeit divesture, downsizing, job-reclassification and 20 years of automation have left the unions representing a mere 125,000-or-so AT&T employees, they still account for over a third of AT&T’s 294,000 total workforce. Ma Bell is still the most heavily unionized company in the United States.

The bulk of AT&T’s current CWA and IBEW contracts expired this April, and four months after the deadline, negotiations are ongoing. Wage cuts, health care and job security remain points of contention at the bargaining table; but the table dynamics are about to change as the last of the union contracts is set to end on August 8th. If a settlement isn’t reached by that date, every unionized AT&T employee will be working without contract and free to strike (with the exception of the 18,500-strong Midwest union, which reached an agreement last week).

The professional makeup of today’s unions are not what they were during the 1983 strike. Switchboard operators have all but been replaced by automated systems. The rise of computing and the Internet over the last 20 years has obsolesced typists, secretaries, clerks and other administrative information workers. Today, the CWA and IBEW predominantly represent (as far as I can gather) customer services, network administrators and field technicians. Ironically, the very same communications technology they helped build now enables customer service and network administration to take place remotely, anywhere in the world. And in a sad twist of fate, the unions’ strike threats have done little but mobilize AT&Ts strike contingency plans, in turn hastening the outsourcing of union jobs–the same outsourcing that’s a key topic of contract negotiations.

But there’s another twist in this story of labor love lost…

There are jobs AT&T can’t outsource, jobs which labor laws prevent AT&T from filling with armies of foreign temp workers: on-site field technicians responsible for the physical maintenance and expansion of AT&T’s infrastructure. When it comes to laying cable underground, climbing telephone poles, descending into manholes and pulling tree branches off wires, it’s an All-American affair. And as it turns out, AT&T policy dictates that “managers” (the non-unionized half of the workforce) take over all vital union jobs during a strike. That’s right. If the unions strike, India effectively takes over all operational knowledge-work, and the white-collar desk jockeys have to strap on tool belts and get dirty.

Contingency Plan 2009 (aka “CP09″)…

In what amounts to the cutest large-scale retraining of a workforce in modern history, for the last 6 months AT&T has been sending any middle (-aged) manager without a doctor’s notice to training facilities throughout the United States to learn the ins-and-outs of telecommunications field work. Throw in hundreds of hours of web-based video training and AT&T hopes its managers, who in theory know how it all works, can keep services running uninterrupted if the CWA and IBEW choose to strike.

The byproduct of AT&T’s so-called Contingency Plan 2009 is hundreds of photos of people who don’t look like they should be climbing telephone poles, in fact, climbing telephone poles. Both bemused and amused, many of these select AT&T managers have uploaded photos of their training experiences to flickr to share with their coworkers the novelty of suspending oneself from a telephone pole, hands-free, on a weekday. (In all fairness, I’ve never climbed a telephone pole, so I’ve got to hand it to those who didn’t bail on the training.) Now not everyone is being trained in the art of lumber ascension; some must learn to navigate the underground, and others will spend their days on rungs (Ladder Day!).

Sightly more seriously… I quite like the idea of designers, planners and architects having to confront the physical reality of their work. One wonders how Frank Gehry’s design sensibilities would change if he had to help construct one of his notoriously difficult-to-build undulating designs. Would ad planners rethink their media buys if they actually had to plaster up all the posters and billboards themselves? Maybe GM should require it’s automotive designers to spend one day a week on the factory line–might they start designing simpler, cheaper cars?

Or, here’s one… maybe all those angry iPhone owners should relax and enjoy the tele-computing miracle they get to carry around in their pockets everyday.

¹Fortunately, eHow has a 7-step tutorial on How to Deal with Union Problems that doesn’t call for the discharge of firearms. Unfortunately, the tutorial’s difficulty has been graded “Moderately Challenging” (wait, what?!)

We Omars, we’re loners, wanderers. Tropically depressed in a High-pressure world. I’ll be back soon enough…promise.

It’s common commuter habit to pull newspapers from the untouched, unsoiled center of the stack, typically leaving a chafed & crusty top-copy for a gust of wind or a late-riser. This annotated edition, left on top, was passed up by a number of unimpressed commuters before I got my chance at it.

To what extent is the subversion of distribution infrastructure to disseminate “unofficial” communications an investment in that infrastructure, versus an attack on it’s intended function? In the same sense that we might interpret graffiti (or an any act of personalization for that matter) as a individual’s stake in a building/city/object’s survival, can we interpret these annotations as an acknowledgment of print media’s legitimacy even though the message directly challenges that media’s honesty? …an intertwining made more complicated by the author’s citations of stories contained within the paper in order substantiate his front-page editorial.

Which gets me thinking…
As news agencies continue co-opting social media to enhance their online outlets, how have they missed the mark by focusing too much on commentary and discussion as supposed enabling reinterpretation and remixing? Are people only interested in having discussions around a news story? Or would they rather introduce their worldviews and biases into a news story? It’s an understandable selfishness…news companies would rather package people into their product than let people re-package their product.

3rd party services like Reframe It offer browser plug-ins that enable the annotation of websites. But these are just surface annotations–just some spatially oriented blog-style comments. The primary work isn’t actually “reframed” because you’re not forced to read the comments first. The original material still frames the comments, not vice versa. In the case of my marked-up amNY, I coudn’t not read the writing first; it is disruptive. The article references/hyperlinks pulled those respective articles into a new context/story. And I was forced to acknowledge the paper’s previous reader before any of the articles’ authors, and it felt like I was genuinely sharing a newspaper with someone – it felt genuinely “social”.

It’s been a few weeks since Usain Bolt’s celebratory 9.69 second jog, the Olympics are well and done, but I still find myself fascinated by the he’s-either-on-steroids-or-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-sprinting-is-wrong 100m world record. I catch myself watching the final once or twice a day (I have the video on my phone); it probably won’t cease to amaze me until he finds a tenth of a second in his busy schedule to surpass it.

I, like the large majority of Americans, did not get to watch Bolt’s run live that Saturday morning as exclusive television rights kept major competitions off the air until NBC’s nightly primetime broadcast. That’s not to say I waited until 9pm; I waited about 15 minutes.

[view full size]

As far as I could gather at the time (and I really wish I had a better way to capture the data), the first YouTube video of Bolt’s record breaker was uploaded at 10:37:02am EST (-5:00), about 6 minutes and 52.31 seconds after the race ended.

<entry>
<id>http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/OL0uEG6Ztjk</id>
<published>2008-08-16T07:37:02.000-07:00</published>
…

The publisher (young, British, impressive selection of homemade wedgie videos) made the interesting choice to avoid the inevitable copyright takedown by hiding the picture – it’s still up, just audio. [UPDATE: Alas, our young lad's account seems to have been suspended due to a terms of use violation, so the video is gone.] 5 minutes later the first actual video appeared, and as expected it was gone shortly thereafter.

<entry>
<id>http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/WYXUWFqj1s0</id>
<published>2008-08-16T07:41:52.000-07:00</published>
…

From that point on, a video of the 100m final appeared on YouTube about every 90 seconds for the next half hour or so; with takedown notices issued just as fast. While many point to illegal downloads as a measure of demand for a copyrighted digital product, what does the quantity of uploads indicate? And particularly, in the case of uploading a recording of a live event, what does the immediacy of the uploads indicate? Knowing well that the lifespan of their videos won’t exceed 15 minutes, what motivates the uploaders? Is it social media status, public service, ideological battle against copyright, just a play for view counts or simply content spam?

Regardless, it was impressive to watch the videos pour in – a sort of crowd-sourced live blog in the form of YouTube search results. And while the large majority of the videos were just recordings of television broadcasts, a few were actually recorded frist-hand by attendees.

As user proficiency of social media sites increases, there’s an increasing number of online services through which events and experiences are documented in near real-time – and increasingly via mobile devices. Between YouTube, flickr and twitter, some sort of digg spy-esque real-time aggregation of that almost-real-time user generated content might be pretty interesting.