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Big changes among the millions

Thursday, October 19, 2006

So the US officially reaches a population of 300 million, with all its accompanying demographic shifts. What changes in Americans’ media-use are afoot, according to the number-crunchers?

Media of all kinds tend to go a little crazy over such proclaimed tipping-points. This week was no exception as newspapers and TV stations throughout the nation went on a code-red maternity alert to claim the actual 300 millionth birth for their own local market.

 
It reminded me of when I was at the United Nations in 1999 and frantic efforts were made to connect Secretary General Kofi Annan, humanely and caringly, with the entire world’s six billionth baby, a second or so after midnight on October 12. Apparently – and it was killjoy-ish to dispute the matter – the winner of this odd contest was an oblivious Bosnian boy, born to 29-year-old Fatima Nevic in Sarajevo’s University Clinical Centre.

 
Switch now to Queens, NY - America’s most diverse county these days - and its contender this week for America’s 300 millionth citizen. In keeping with what Richard Rodriguez’s pithy social commentaries call “the browning of America”, the new attention-winning baby is Emanuel Plata (pictured above) - born to a young immigrant couple from Mexico. What kind of changed media landscape will he grow up to inhabit?

 
The signs are interesting – according to the San Francisco-based analysts Telephia who specialize in communications and new media markets, and whom I consulted as well as the US Census Bureau. As regular readers will know, I have some fascination with society’s increasingly mobile consumption of electronic material – so I was intrigued to learn from Telephia’s latest survey that Hispanics and African-Americans are disproportionately more committed watchers of video on their phones than are Caucasians. (See the Telephia report in detail here.)

Also - for what it’s worth - the age group among all ethnicities, according to Telephia, that uses cellphones most for watching video turns out to be the 25-36 year olds - even more than teenagers or early twentysomethings.

But if the overall trends are being correctly reported, it won’t be long before tiny Emanuel could be viewing his pre-kindergarten shows from Nickelodeon on a small screen gripped in his own little hand as his carriage trundles the streets of Queens.

  

WHEN THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS STILL HOVERED not much above merely two hundred million – back in 1975, in fact – a distinctive cultural landmark suddenly appeared in the form of “A Chorus Line”.

 
The current exciting and exhausting revival at Broadway’s Schoenfeld Theatre pays welcome tribute to a piece that has weathered not just years of performance but translation from play to film and back again. Charlotte D’Amboise I found simply stunning in the role of Cassie, who compels our sympathy with the central dilemma of being a stand-out star and still yearning to be a complete team-player.

 
I’ve heard some carping from aficionados of the original, but as someone who never saw Michael Bennett’s staging, I found his co-choreographer Bob Avian’s direction 31 years later completely persuasive.

 
We may now, thanks to Oprah and more, have become an even greater confessional age than the seventies, but the individual dancers’ stories still pack power, with their repeated theme of abusive households propelling young people to find refuge and fulfillment via a dance class. Where else, and where better, could Edward Kleban’s writing and Marvin Hamlisch’s music wring such pathos by rhyming “home” with “metronome”?

 

“SUREFOOTED” IS NOT WHAT YOU’D CALL THE UN’s public relations experts – and I don’t just mean in trying to exploit the planet’s six-billionth child.

 
Very late in the game, they’ve latched onto LonelyGirl15, the now-exposed, phony lovesick teenager (actually played by actress Jessica Lee Rose) who won a huge following on YouTube.com. She features in a new video ad campaign, addressing a camera in her bedroom as usual – but this time talking not about a boy, but about world poverty and hunger. It’s the result of the UN having recourse once more to the services of advertising agency Young & Rubicam.

 
(I know Y&R of old, and their pro bono work for the UN’s Millennium session in 2000, when the Millennium Goals for the world’s development were launched, and on which I too worked. In one sense, their contribution was a triumph of tightly-focused messaging – bus-shelter posters extolling each of the eight Goals. Where could these exhortations be seen? At bus-stops on Manhattan’s First and Second Avenues, within a few hundred yards of the UN’s headquarters. Visiting diplomats saw them – but I wonder how many others did.)

 
LonelyGirl15’s broadside against global starvation is only one of several Y&R efforts that draw their amateur flavor from the YouTube model. A group of young Oklahoma men are seen in one ad, produced by an aptly-named Rednecks TV, sitting around eating beans.

 
It’s hard to miss the influence of the famous beans-scene in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles”. After some flatulence-based ribaldry, the talk turns suddenly serious and one man declares informatively to the camera: “Some folks don’t even have a bowl of beans to eat!”

 
The UN turned this one down. In the words of Mandy Kibel, head of communications for the UN’s Millennium Campaign: “It doesn’t reflect who we are”.