Net Jockey
My schedule has been cooling down alongside the weather. Since my day job involves sitting hours behind a computer monitor, the best time for me to get it done is when the weather isn’t that great outside. It’s been raining almost all weekend here and I tend to enjoy working then. It’s also about this time of year when I like to remind myself why I enjoy my work which often involves learning something new or delving into a fun side project. One project that’s kinda been lingering in my mind for the last several years is related to broadcasting. It was brought up recently in a text thread between some friends because I grew up around broadcasting. My family spent the vast majority of their careers in radio and I hosted a nighttime radio show for a couple of years. My father also had an advertising agency and had suggested I study design in college to help me take over the agency. I slipped into web development while I was there and the agency is long gone.
The older I get, the more realistic I’ve become in terms of who I am. Although I’ve tried not to let my work define who I am, the bulk of my experience as a developer has relied on the evolution of the web as a medium. Although the illusion of some sort of computer code wizardry might make my job seem fanciful, it could also be described as a net jockey which would more closely link me to the family business. I’ve always looked at the web as a type of broadcast medium and a net jockey is just using a different medium powered by computer networks. The medium is the message1 no matter the jockey. I believe that a large part of my father and uncle’s success was deeply tied to the timing of the evolution of FM radio. On a bunch of occasions, they’ve told me stories of how they went around to every car dealer in the region convincing them to order new cars with FM radios installed, sometimes with an offer to trade out promotion. Likewise, a fella named Gary Parsons2 who lived right up the road from where I grew up in South Carolina disc jockeyed a night show and later founded XM Satellite Radio which was the first satellite radio broadcaster in the U.S. It wasn’t until General Motors bought in that in dash satellite receivers started being offered in automobiles. He’s adapted to new technologies and is now working on geolocating network users.
The people who influenced my father were folks like John Richbourg3, also a South Carolina native, who became the model for others like Wolfman Jack. He became famous jockeying from WLAC4 in Nashville when, in the early 50s the station bumped up to 50,000 watts with a directional antenna that could reach the majority of the east coast and midwestern states especially at night. Many music historians credit these nightly shows as the foundation of rock and roll. The station was acquired by Scripps several years back and has become a backbone of the sensational talk radio crowd which reminds me that I learned very early on to distrust broadcasted information. In about third grade or so I heard my father talking on the radio one morning about going to dinner the night before with his family. Since I knew we hadn’t gone there to eat, I couldn’t understand how he could lie to others while insisting I never do it. I asked my mom why, to which she replied with “ask your father”. Although I don’t think I ever did, it brought down the third or fourth wall5 rather quickly and I became suspect of all advertising while learning to differentiate performance from reality. It always reminds me of this scene in American Graffiti6.
The term disc jockey was abandoned sometime in the 80s in favor of radio personality. The etymology of the word jockey7 is actually pretty derogatory. It’s more closely related to jockstrap than horse or disc jockey. Although originally appearing as the Scottish version of the name John, it became associated with horse dealers, riders, minstrels and vagabonds. It became synonymous with a trickster, hence the verb jockey to ‘outwit’ or ‘out do’. It was used as a slang term for a penis and subsequently used to define a prostitutes client. It was first applied to radio broadcasting by Walter Winchell8 in 1935 to slander his competitor. Winchell was notoriously brutal and several documentaries have been made largely focused on how power corrupts the influence of ‘the media’. For years, many folks were very surprised to learn that the disc jockeys on WLAC who had ushered in the era of rock and roll were actually white.
Needless to say, the internet has set the jockeys loose in the derogatory sense of the word. Everyone has become their own public relations agents promo’ing themselves and anything someone will pay for. Most are still lying to sell you something, sensationalizing, propagandizing, blurring their identities, bending reality, and using the equivalent of modern sound effects. Neil Young wrote in 1983, “the schemes of today would make Alan Freed9 look like a saint”. Payola10 never went away, it’s just in an entirely different form. I can’t see any end in sight as I watch the young folks navigate the web. The new La La Lands are factories in China where live streamers work from scripts selling anything you can imagine. The New York Times did a documentary entitled Inside the Daily Life of a Live Streaming Star in China11 which is a fascinating modern study on the incredible machine that net jockeying has become. TikTok is now a record label and OnlyFans produces films. The rise of ‘influencers’ alongside the medium is just the same album on repeat. As Twitter changed hands this last week, I couldn’t help but wonder about the future of medium since I had logged on the week they began. Elon Musk is just another jockey, albeit a form closer to that of Howard Hughes11 or Henry Ford12. He’s just jockeying the new spruce goose or horseless carriage in the form of online payments and electric motors. The Twitter acquisition might end up resembling Ford’s purchase of the Dearborn Independent. I’ve now spent enough time behind the curtains online to know how small the wizard really is. E-commerce has finally overtaken adult content just last year. Jockeying yourself into the lead using technology isn’t anything new and I think Elon is going to struggle with this one in the long term since the underlying technology isn’t really anything proprietary. Although he complained about the bots, the pay to play model alongside other content monetization will just serve to amplify the inattentiveness13. If you’d like to join the choir, please know that the ‘void is full’14.
About a decade ago, my father wrapped up his last radio stint hosting a morning show for the nations largest broadcasting network. He liked to joke about how the morning drive time slot was a ‘captive audience’. At some point, I’ll try to archive some old broadcasts and I sometimes wonder how I can help the legacy without having to be a jockey. Quite frankly, growing up around it always made me want to avoid the spotlight. I’ve had the luxury remaining relatively behind the scenes and turning away work I cannot personally support. I avoid self promotion in favor of burying my name in the source code in case I need to prove my credentials elsewhere. Although I’ve manage to acquire the knowledge skillset to do so, this here net jockey has preferred to play the wizard. I’ll just set up a multi-platform syndication and broadcasting server for my colleagues and stay behind the curtains. As of now, I think I’ve made a wise choice because there is a lot of freedom in relative anonymity even though I’ve never been afraid to voice my opinion. If I ever decide that I want to make it about personal clicks, views, likes, audience share, or feel I have an important message… I’ll likely use a pseudonym, pen, or stage name so there is no way you could bet the jockey and not the horse.
- The Medium is the Message – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
- Gary Parsons – https://www.crunchbase.com/person/gary-parsons
- John R – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R.
- WLAC – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLAC
- The Fourth Wall – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall
- American Graffiti – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Graffiti
- Jockey – https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jockey
- Walter Winchell – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Winchell
- Alan Freed – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Freed
- Payola – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
- Inside the Daily Life of a Live Streaming Star in China – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlnfiULnmMY
- Howard Hughes ( Watergate ) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes#Connections_to_Richard_Nixon_and_Watergate
- Henry Ford ( Dearborn Independent ) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_The_Dearborn_Independent
- Twitter @windhamdavid – https://twitter.com/windhamdavid/status/1357350087521947648
- The Void is Full. Please Stop Screaming into It. – https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-void-is-full-please-stop-screaming-into-it