I don’t think many media-studies folks read this blog, but I thought that I would pose a question that’s troubled me for a while. What do you call a cable content operation like CNN or ESPN? In television studies, “network” generally refers to a content operation that distributes content to a system of local affiliates, which are either independently owned or, increasingly, separate business units. “The Networks” almost always refers to CBS, NBC, ABC, and sometimes FOX, while the CW and PAX are also networks that aren’t part of “The Networks.” In contrast, cable content operations like CNN have a different business arrangement where their content is licensed to local cable operators, so they’re not really “networks” in the sense that NBC is a network.
Both of my readers are probably rolling their eyes right now at this distinction, but it’s both historically important (I’m working on a paper for “Post-Network Television”.) and relevant to the political economy of television. The words “operator” and “provider” refer almost exclusively to local system operators, and my fallback “channel” is just lame. I suppose the solution is to use the “cable” modifier, so CNN is “cable network,” but it would be nice if there was a precise term for these organizations.
4 Comments If any readers are curious about the Velvet Underground acetate that recently sold for $155,401.00 on eBay, you can download mp3s of the early VU recording here. An acetate is a kind of phonograph record cut with a lathe; before tape recording was widespread, many studios had recording lathes to audition recordings or create masters for duplication. This acetate came from a 1966 session that led to the recording of The Velvet Underground and Nico that we know and love today.
If you haven’t guessed from the frequency of posting, dear readers, I’ve been tied up with end-of-semester duties, but I thought VU-related news item was worth posting. If you haven’t realized it already, dear readers, my current tagline is a quote from VU’s “Some Kinda Love.”
At lunch yesterday, I told one of my technically-minded colleagues that my paper “Web 2.0 is People!” was accepted into the Cultural Studies Association conference in April, and my colleague asked me, “What do they mean by Web 2.0, anyway?”
I responded by asking, “Have you read ‘Tim O’Reilly’s ‘What is Web 2.0?‘”
My colleague chuckled and said no, but asked if it was a set of technologies. I replied that it’s more of a design issue.
Today I remembered to forward my colleague a link to the O’Reilly article. Rather than dig through my del.icio.us, I thought the fastest way to find the article would be to query Google for “What is Web 2.0?” To my surprise, the article I wanted did not appear at the top of the page. Instead, it had a link that read “Web definitions for Web 2.0″ and an excerpt from the Wikipedia article. O’Reilly’s essay was the first search result. I wondered if Google was supporting natural language queries or simply returning Wikipedia extracts with the keywords “What is.”
Unsure if I really knew what is meant by “natural language query,” I typed in “What are natural language queries?”, which returned a similar page of Web definitions, and an abstract from a page at the University of Kansas. I tried a few more “what is” queries, like “What is deconstruction?” which returned a literary definition from the US Department of State. (Oddly, the definition doesn’t appear in the page Google links to.) And to make a cheap allusion to Plato’s Symposium, I decided to ask Google “What is Love?” This referred me to Princeton’s WordNet site.
Of course, Google could just be using “what is” as a particular kind of keyword, so I thought I would try few other queries. Although I quit smoking years ago, I decided to ask “How do I quit smoking?” which didn’t do anything special. Then I decided to try a “Who is” query, so I asked “Who is Ingmar Bergman?” Google answered, “Ingmar Bergman is a Swedish film director according to [the URI for the Wikipedia article on Bergman.]” Other “who is” queries were less exciting. “Who is Chris McConnell” just returned the usual results for my name, and “Who is Mike Jones?” led to information about the album by the Houston Chopped & Screwed artist.
It does seem like Google is just using word combinations like “what is” and “who is” as keywords, rather than trying to implement a comprehensive system of natural language queries. Using queries like this, however, does remind me that using labels and titles like, “How do I quit smoking” may improve the ranking of informational pages in Google and other search engines.
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