In a move that speaks to the extent to which famous people stop being individuals and start being part of a conglomerated project that includes their images, Deadline notes that Elvis Presley Enterprises and Muhammad Ali Enterprises, which include the rights to the images of both men, may be headed to the market. If still images of Presley and Ali could generate $60 million a year, it’s intriguing to think what they could generate with technology that could bring them back to life as shadows. What would nostalgia concerts featuring Presley rake in? What about technology that lets a promoter put on a fight between Ali and Manny Pacquiao?

The company that resurrected Tupac Shakur in the form of a hologram for a memorable 2011 concert, Digital Domain Media Group, actually planned to create a similar digital replica of Presley before it filed for bankruptcy in 2012. And bringing the dead back to reclaim their former glory, with all the profits going to the corporations that own their images, isn’t the only way that this sort of technology could be valuable–and very disconcerting.

If the prospect of someone owning your likeness, your expressions, your voice, and the ability to manipulate those images and audio to make you do or say anything, is odd enough when you aren’t around to see it, or to verify whether or not your image is doing or saying something you’d actually do or say, it’s even more unsettling to consider what it would be like for someone to be able to do those things when you were still alive. That scenario’s precisely what’s at issue in a new movie making its debut at Cannes, The Congress, which combines live-action and animation to follow a fictionalized version of Robin Wright as, on advice from her agent, who believes she’s wasted her career, she allows herself to be digitized and manipulated, in part so she can afford to spend time with her son, who appears to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Even without the trippy animation, the trailer gets at how disconcerting it must be to see someone, apparently yourself, do things that you haven’t done–and that you’d never do:

The news broke this morning that Yahoo, which had been discussed as a potential buyer for Hulu, the streaming video portal set up by the broadcast networks, decided to make another investment instead. For $1.1 billion, up from a valuation of $800 million in September 2011, Yahoo has purchased the microblogging and social networking site Tumblr.

One of the reasons Yahoo bought Tumblr is simple: it was available. Facebook bought photo-editing-and-sharing app Instagram last year, a move that made sense given Facebook’s focus on social distribution of information, particularly of images. The bulletin-board service Pinterest pulled in a $200 million round of funding in February, but it’s not clear that the company would be open to a sale, or even if it were, that Yahoo would have been interested in the business model, given the uncertain path from getting revenue out of Pinterest. Various estimates seem to be putting Twitter’s value between $9 and $10 billion, and the company seems more likely to opt for an initial public offering than to sell out to another social media or internet company. Facebook’s IPO is a year old. Of the large social media companies examined by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, that left Tumblr as the property available to Yahoo if it wanted to buy another popular service.

But even if there had been another appealing property on the block—and speculation continues to swirl about whether another company will buy Hulu—Tumblr would still have been appealing for two reasons, one a hard figure, one a perception. The first is that 13 percent of internet users aged 18-29 told Pew that they use Tumblr, a figure that suggests that an enormous number of Tumblr users could be coming online in coming years. The second is the perception that Tumblr is a female-driven service. That isn’t quite accurate. That same Pew study found that 6 percent of both male and female internet users report that they’re on Tumblr, though the sample Pew used is slightly weighted towards women, surveying 956 women out of 1,802 total respondents. But whatever the actual numbers, the perception is that Tumblr has a female-heavy user base (as well as a strong LGBTQ one).

So when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer talks, as she did this morning on the call that announced the deal, about the fact that “Tumblr views itself as a home for brands,” like movies, or suggests that Tumblr and Yahoo could work together the way Google and Blogger did, with Yahoo serving ads on Tumblrs whose users would like to have ad placement, she’s talking about getting ads in front of young users, and monetizing content by young people. And whether it’s true or not, the perception will be that Mayer specifically means getting ads in front of monetizing content created by female and non-straight young people.

Whether that means that the oft-mocked confessionals and .GIFs of Tumblr will come to be seen as respectable because they’re something Yahoo is going to try to make money off of is a different question entirely. Yahoo’s perception that young people will help it shore up its aging brand, and that they’ll be valuable to advertisers isn’t actually much different that the insight that young women be shopping. Sometimes, the very fact that young people, particularly young women, have money to spend is the thing that makes them seem ridiculous to the very people who would like to extract that money from them. Trendhopping that necessitates regular consumption and deep engagement on things that other people have deemed frivolous are traits that make consumers or users valuable to advertisers. But the assignment of financial value to those behaviors has never meant that we pass along any more deference to young people’s tastes as part of a larger bargain.

National Review roving correspondent Kevin Williamson is in the process of congratulating himself for, in response to having been repeatedly interrupted by a phone-using patron at the theater last night, grabbing her phone, hurling it away from her, and getting himself slapped and ejected:

The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.

So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

In a civilized world, I would have received a commendation of some sort. To the theater-going public of New York — nay, the the world – I say: “You’re welcome.”

Let’s leave aside the facts that making grand statement’s like Williamson’s is almost certainly more disruptive both to fellow patrons and to the actors on stage than the use of a cell phone in the audience, and that sending someone else’s phone across the theater at great speed is a much more efficient way to make a martyr of said terribly rude person than to strike a blow for civility. Williamson is right on two points: the use of cell phones in live performances in particular is inexcusably rude, and theaters need to do much more to protect both audiences and performers from interruption.

Theaters tend towards politeness for the most part, asking people to turn off their phones, cameras, tablets, etc., rather than telling people directly that device use will get them automatically ejected and even banned, or, less coercively, using what’s been found to be a psychologically effective tactic of telling audiences what percentage of their peers turn off their phones. But theaters are private establishments that are allowed to set their own rules, and have plenty of good grounds to do so, including the safety of performers who could be distracted by a bright cell phone screen in the audience, and the pleasure of the vast majority of patrons who come to shows hoping to be uninterrupted. And it would be nice to see them be far more proactive to set clear ground rules, to have ushers monitor the house from the back and proactively warn and then eject patrons who use their phones, and even to consider bans on people who don’t comply with stated rules. Such a policy might risk losing some business, but a theatergoer who’s spending all night on the phone should be judged a less valuable customer than one who pays attention.

Or theaters could take a different approach and circumvent the problem of phones in the seats altogether. I attend critics’ screenings of films all the time where the people running the screenings require people attending the film to check their cell phones in paper bags, mostly as an anti-piracy measure. It seems to work just fine, and people seem to submit without much hassle. Theaters for staged plays have two advantages on movie theaters: they already have coat checks, for the most part, and they’re dealing with far fewer performances, so handling the volume of checked phones, whether patrons have to put them in lockers or hand them over directly, shouldn’t be impossible. If the slight inconvenience protects well-intentioned patrons from both cell phone use and the squabbles over it, it’s well worth it.

This is what pop culture scientists—and the women they date—look like. (Image Credit: FanPop)

Last week found tech titan Peter Thiel complaining about the depiction of technology in popular culture, arguing that movies with the message that “technology is going to kill you,” were slowing down interest in tech jobs, the tech industry, and the skills necessary to achieve in both. Yesterday, it was Sen. Jay Rockefeller who, during a hearing on immigration reform, suggested that what the United States needs to get back on top in the new economy is pop culture. “If, and I’m just positing, that if we lift the whole subject of sophisticated education, STEM, to a very much more visible level,” he mused. “We didn’t have TV programs called Law & Order, we had TV programs called Science and Engineering and Math and Technology, that’s a stretch, I think it really comes down to some of those human factors. What is it that holds us back?”

The witness to whom Rockefeller was speaking, Jeffrey Bussgang, who has the kind of amazing title of senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School, gave an answer that both endorsed Rockefeller’s suggestion that pop culture is a powerful tool to get audiences interested in science, and that underscored how strange both Thiel and Rockefeller’s suggestions are. “Being a geek,” Bussgang said, “is more cool than it’s ever been.”

As I wrote when Thiel first filed his grievance, he has a point in the long term. There are an awful lot of post-apocalypses happening on movie screens because our stewardship of technology has failed in some way, whether through our lax management of technology, or because we wanted too much from it. But nerds are everywhere in popular culture right now, and as they’ve moved to the center of the screen from their peripheral roles as supporting characters, they’ve come to be presented as aspirational figures, not just professionally.
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In an interesting nod to Hollywood’s influence, tech titan Peter Thiel has suggested that his industry is being hurt hurt by its portrayal in Hollywood as a source of advancements with post-apocalyptic consequences:

Thiel, who made billions as a co-founder of PayPal and as an early investor in Facebook, told a standing-room only audience Monday that the high-tech industry is in “deceleration” due in no small part to movies like Avatar and The Matrix that make technological innovation seem “destructive and dysfunctional.”

Hollywood keeps making movies where “technology is going to kill you,” Thiel complained at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. He said the “Star Trek retread movies” are an exception. Thiel said other factors — like government regulation and a “risk-averse” business culture — also are hampering the tech industry, but it will be a “very good sign” when Hollywood stops making movies about scary new technologies.

I think this calculation is a bit off. Hollywood tends to portray technology in three broad categories: as a source of miracles and certainty in day-to-day life, as an industry that has large concentrations of smart, if socially awkward, people, and as a force that operates independent of its creators. Those first two categories are almost uniformly positive. And I think that the real damage would be done if science fiction suggested clearer connections between the current state of science and the possibility of future developments gone terribly wrong.

Technology really is everywhere in pop culture depictions of contemporary life, and almost uniformly portrayed as a source of good or an extremely useful tool. DNA matching is presented as so reliable on televised crime shows that it affects how juries view evidence, and how lawyers decide their cases. And it’s hardly the only technological miracle to make regular appearances on crime shows. Bones, a procedural I enjoy quite a bit, features everything from the Angelator, a computer simulation tool that can recreate all sorts of crime scenarios, crack codes, match faces, and pour through data, to the inventive experiments of Jack Hodgins who’s presented as a genius at analyzing particles and organic materials. And that’s just in the matter of biological science. Pop culture has adopted rapidly from presenting computers in and of themselves as magical portals—an early Veronica Mars episode treats the Internet Movie Database as if it’s something of a miracle—to treating them as tools that ordinary people can achieve wonders with, whether they’re empowered by blogging or tweeting (or sleuthing through social media), or hacking publications, databases, or processes, be it for good or evil. These are all tools that can be used for any number of ends, be they cruel or kind, but the capacities of technology are firmly under the control of the human beings who employ them, rather than independent entities with wills of their own.
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In a provocative piece at The New Republic, Marc Tracy traces the rise and decline of the blog, a form that has essentially conquered the distribution of information online, but whose ubiquity has made individual personalities less important:

When he started a blog, it was on his own—other than a small handful of strange, Web-only creatures, in 2001, what magazine wanted a blog? By 2005, the answer to that question had changed, allowing Sullivan to ensconce his blog in larger institutions—Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast, in chronological order. This was the golden age of the personal blog: The Internet had empowered a few strong writers to create their own brand (if you were idiosyncratic—say, if you were gay, English, Catholic, and heretically conservative—then all the better) and a few strong big brands to create their own small brands (Media Decoder was launched in 2009, and finds its roots in TV Decoder, a blog that was started when the Times poached writer Brian Stelter, who like Sullivan, Klein, et. al had built a following on the Internet as a personal brand). Meanwhile, readers interested in reading the best that had been thought and said on the Internet had no choice except to follow along—the best they could do was to use RSS to focus on the feeds they tended to find interesting.

But today, Google Reader is dying, Media Decoder is dead, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish is alive in new form. This year, Sullivan decided that he was a big enough brand, commanding enough attention and traffic, to strike out on his own. At the beginning of the last decade, the institutions didn’t need him. Today, he feels his best chance for survival is by becoming one of the institutions, complete with a staff and a variety of content. What wasn’t going to work was continuing to have, merely, a blog.

What Tracy really means, he clarifies, is that “What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter.” Obviously, it’s true that the first-mover advantage for blogging is gone, and that fewer people are coming on line as individual bloggers. When I started working at ThinkProgress two years ago, it was already evident that this was a way that fewer and fewer people were getting full-time writing jobs. And what was even clearer was that publications like The Atlantic and the Daily Beast that were hiring lots of individual bloggers were doing so as a way to populate channels. The key technology now is less the publishing platforms that let people write short posts and publish them in a continuous stream, and more the ability to cross-post, so a piece can live both on an author’s individual page, or in the feed on a relavent subject or for a relevant section.

Or as Michael S. Rosenwald, who wrote a blog for the Washington Post called Rosenwald, Md., put it: “We’ve been rethinking blogs here at the Post. Many of us bloggers are moving over to personality pages. In one place, you’ll be able to find all my stories for various sections of the paper (Page One, Metro, Outlook, Sunday Business) as well blog posts about life in Maryland and the rest of the region. Click here for the link to my personality page, which you can bookmark for easy access.”

And I think this is a situation that signals less the decline of blogs than their evolution. Readers can continue to follow the feeds of individual writers they prefer, or whole sections that they find interesting, depending on whether they’re interested in a particular perspective or a larger news feed. If blogging started out as a way to accomodate the way writers wanted to publish their work, it’s now come to serve a different end in giving readers flexibility in how they curate what they want to read, and publications the ability to accomodate them. That’s not death, precisely. It’s more like metamorphosis.

I’m at the Creativity Conference, a joint project of Microsoft, Time Magazine, and the Motion Picture Association of America, this morning, and I’ll have more to come on President Clinton’s remarks this afternoon. But one of the presentations I’ve been struck by most so far is that from Steven Bathiche, a distinguished scientist (seriously, great job title) on some of the technologies they’re developing. Specifically, he talked about how the company, in working on sending separate images to each eye for an individual user so they can see images in 3D, decided to also work on sending different images to different users from the same screen. The example he used to illustrate a potential application? Two people who resolve their differences about which television show to watch by watching different shows—on the same television, at the same time.

That’s a fascinating idea, of togetherness while having separate experiences. So much of the development of technology for the distribution about technology has been about allowing us to separate ourselves from each other, whether it’s DVRs that let us access content from any television in a house, or apps that let us watch television on any device we want, cloistering ourselves off from each other with headphones. Microsoft’s technology, if it gets fully developed and distributed in households, would bring us back into physical proximity, though it would probably still keep us separated from each other because we’d have to wear headphones—setting up your eyes and your ears to receive separate signals are very different projects. And I wonder if it might actually be more alienating to be sitting with someone who appears to be having the same experience with you, but in fact is off in an entirely different world.

But it’s a reminder of how valuable television that’s appealing enough to bring a critical mass of people together in a room at the same time slot still feels. It’s rare. But it still feels like a different and exciting experience.