In this month's Let’s Talk episode, Angela and B speak with AMT Lab's Chief Editor, Lutie Rodriguez, about broadband access and its relationship with arts vibrancy. They then recap and reflect on the 2021 Oscars awards and discuss the new iOS update featuring App Tracking Transparency, which allows users to conveniently opt out of data tracking and is considered a win for user privacy.

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Transcript

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Angela: Welcome to the Let's Talk series of Tech in the Arts, the podcast for the Arts Management and Technology Laboratory. My name is Angela Johnson and I'm the Podcast Producer.

B: And I'm B Crittenden, the Technology and Interactive Content Manager.

Angela: Each month we review trending stories and discussions with topics such as streaming, artificial intelligence, marketing, social media, inclusion, fundraising, and much more. Our goal is to exchange ideas, bring awareness and stay on top of the trends. In this month's episode, we speak to AMT Lab's Chief Editor, Lutie Rodriguez, about broadband access and its relationships to the SMU Arts Vibrancy map. We also discuss the recent shake up of the formatting of the Oscars, and the new iOS update, which allows users to opt out of data tracking. Hope you enjoy.

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B: Today, we have a very special guest again. We have Lutie Rodriguez, our Chief Editor for AMT Lab. She is joining us to share about a topic that she has been researching over the last couple months, so welcome, Lutie.

Lutie: Thanks for having me. I don't know if I'm considered special still. I feel like I've been a guest pretty often.

Angela: I feel like you win the award for most recurring guests.

B: Yes. So, Lutie, your work was just published on the AMT Lab website. It's called Comparing Digital Access with Arts Vibrancy in the United States. Would you like to give a brief intro into this subject and share why you were interested in writing about this?

Lutie: Sure. Within the past—I guess it's been more than a year now with the pandemic—I think people have been more aware of how internet access affects people's ability to go through their daily lives since a lot of aspects of what we do have gone online, on Zoom and stuff. I was helping with a creative writing workshop earlier on in the pandemic and they had mentioned that I needed strong internet to be able to be the host and have so many participants on the call. And it just made me think, if you didn't have strong internet, you might not be able to participate in these things during the pandemic. Or if you didn't have internet at all, you definitely wouldn't be able to participate, because at the time, places like libraries were still shut down because of social distancing measures and whatnot. So I was thinking a lot about how internet access impact people's ability to participate in the arts and kind of wanted to do some more research on that, see if there was a way to quantify it. So for this article, I ended up looking at SMU DataArts' Arts Vibrancy Map—they define arts vibrancy using arts dollars, arts providers, and government support—and then comparing that to the Federal Communications Commission's data on broadband deployment in the United States.

Angela: It's such an important issue. I feel like the thing with the pandemic, especially, is just that there are so many issues that are just being kind of forced into the light and existed way before, but just because everything is kind of stripped bare, we're suddenly seeing all these places where it's like, "Oh, this has been a problem for a long time." But now it's, like, really a problem.

Lutie: Right.

Angela: It's...the only way that we're all communicating right now is over the internet, so it's just so difficult if you don't have access.

Lutie: Definitely, and people are realizing that, which is a good thing, that this extends into normal times too. A few weeks ago, whenever President Biden was announcing the big infrastructure package, there is $100 billion included in that for broadband deployment in rural areas, which is good. Also interesting that broadband is now a part of an infrastructure package instead of just roads, bridges, etc.

Angela: I think we all are starting to see that the internet is...it's necessary. Like, it's not a luxury. It's just part of being in our society, like roads and bridges.

B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if we're bringing this into the arts realm, now, we've learned that it's really important for arts organizations in terms of reaching their audiences. Our audiences have to have some sort of digital connectivity to reach us., and if they don't, then we're not reaching those people. But it's not only, like, streaming events, it's also...in your article, you say, "online ticket purchases, public transportation apps, parking apps for even parking at the venue, and then, like, app based program guides." So it's so much more than just, like, watching an event. It's all of those other little hurdles that are now built into, like, participating.

Lutie: I think it's exciting that a lot of arts organizations are boosting their digital presence, and I think that is really important and something that they should be doing. But, also—not that this is happening right now—but I think they just need to be aware of who they could possibly be leaving behind and making sure that it's not fully digital at the expense of leaving people out.

B: I was also thinking about hiring practices, and how so much of the job application and job hiring process is just online. And as organizations are thinking about diversity and inclusion and accessibility, they need to just consider how people are learning about the opportunities at their organizations, and then how potential hires can actually go through the process of applying for jobs.

Lutie: Right. There are people who are considered, like, smartphone-only internet users, which are people who only have access to the internet through a smartphone, and that is largely Black and Hispanic communities. But research from Pew did point out that if you are one of those smartphone-only users, that really prohibits your access to things like job boards, since you can't really apply to a job on your phone.

Angela: It's hard to write a cover letter in the Notes app, I guess. I think it's so important to just always be thinking about who we’re really leaving behind, also just in terms of accessibility. Yeah, it reminds me of, like, establishments and restaurants that, like, are going cashless. And everyone says, like, "Yeah, but who uses cash anymore?" And the answer is: people who are experiencing poverty or homelessness. And it's like, you're just cutting off access to them to these places.

B: It's just, like, this never ending balancing act of making sure that we're accessible and inclusive while we're plunging into the digital age.

Lutie: Along with that, what I thought was interesting when I was doing research for this: initially, when just looking at the numbers, it seems like the most affected places are rural and tribal areas within the U.S. But when looking at the number of households who don't have home broadband access, most are actually in metropolitan areas. That just doesn't show up as much in the percentages, because yes, there is a high percentage of households with broadband, but numbers-wise, the majority of people without internet at home in the United States do live in metropolitan areas.

Angela: And that's because the majority of people live in metropolitan areas.

Lutie: Yeah, but I think purely percentage-wise, people think of lacking internet access as kind of a rural issue.

B: Your article says 94.4% of the U.S. as a whole has fixed terrestrial broadband that's sort of, like, the standardized as acceptable speed, but only 77.7% of the population in rural areas and 72.3% of the population in tribal lands have that same access

Angela: Because there's less infrastructure, but there's still lots of people that just don't have internet access because they can't afford it. But yeah, yeah, I understand what you're saying. Because metropolitan areas are so diverse in terms of, like, class and wealth and opportunity, it's very easy to not see the people who don't have access or who are experiencing poverty. And just, like, you just don't see it as much, because the wealthy people are also there. So then on average, it's fine.

Lutie: Right. And I think, for example, if your arts organization is in a large metropolitan area—which there are a lot of arts organizations in those areas—you might think that internet access is not as much of a problem where you are and where you're operating, but I think that's definitely the wrong assumption.

There are other factors than just location that affect who has home internet access and not. Pew Research did a study on internet access by race and they specifically looked at white versus Black versus Hispanic Americans, and looking at home broadband, while 79% of white residents have it, only 66% of Black Americans and then 61% of Hispanic Americans have home broadband. And device access is even worse than that with 82% of white Americans and then 58% of Black Americans and only 57% of Hispanic Americans having a desktop or laptop computer, which kind of ties back to what we were talking about, about needing to have something like a laptop or computer to do things like job applications that you can't do on a smartphone.

B: Throughout this I was thinking about solutions, like the infrastructure package that you mentioned, that are attempting to try and mitigate these issues, although you mentioned that that's specifically for rural areas, where as we discussed, there are plenty of broadband access issues in urban areas, as well. But I was also thinking about, like, what some other solutions are for the individual who doesn't have access to home broadband, and I think libraries play a really interesting role there. In terms of, like, digital equity. There was an interesting article published by the Atlantic in March, and they profiled three libraries within the Columbus Ohio Metropolitan library system. And based on their position in the city, they each played a very different role. For example: one, they found that users were largely coming there to use the physical machines, to use the computers, and then another one, they found that people were pretty much there just to have access to WiFi. They would even just, like, sit in the parking lot. So I think—not that libraries can save us from this issue, because there are a lot of limitations there like you can only be there for certain hours and maybe you aren't a convenient distance away from a library, you know, it's not the one solution, but I think they do play an interesting role currently, in this landscape.

Angela: When it comes to, like, broadband access in, like, rural areas, I feel like a lot of that more is an infrastructural problem. And then when it comes to metropolitan areas, it's more...well, not that it isn't all over, but a lot of it is, like, an issue of poverty and an issue of, like, systemic racism and, like, all these, like, other things that have a lot of side effects, one of them being a lack of internet access. And I love the idea that libraries will save the world.

B: It's a cool article. It has three interactive maps showing the use of each location based on, like, characteristics of its, like, geographic areas. It's pretty cool. But you have a cool interactive map on yours, as well.

Lutie: Yeah, so I chose to show my research visually. I chose to make a map of Texas at the county level showing both broadband access and their arts vibrancy scores, which come from the SMU DataArts Arts Vibrancy Map. And I chose Texas because it has four really large metropolitan areas, as well as, obviously, it's a big state so lots of rural areas in between those. So I thought it would be a good representation of arts vibrancy and broadband access within the United States. And one thing that I thought was interesting was that there didn't seem to be really any patterns. Like, there were some counties with low broadband but still pretty high vibrancy scores, and then vice versa. So I will be looking into that further. Yeah, I don't know what I came into this research thinking. I guess I was wondering if things like internet access would affect what people perceive as arts vibrancy or what people measure as arts vibrancy.

Angela: I think that's, like, an interesting question. And I'm sure that broadband access can only help arts vibrancy.

B: Right, like, is there a correlation? And, if so, is there causation?

Lutie: Right.

B: Is there reason to believe that, like you said, Angela, if there's internet access, that is allowing your area or your region to increase all of those measures more easily. We will look forward to seeing what your research uncovers.

Lutie: Well, thank you both. I guess this is the last Let's Talk of the team, right?

B: Yeah. Thanks for joining us.

Angela: Yeah.

Lutie: Yeah, of course. Have a good evening, y'all. Thanks for chatting.

Angela: So the Oscars were two weeks ago, April 25, and it was a little different from normal as you can imagine, because...pandemic. I think that there are some really interesting things to talk about here, three things in particular. Specifically, viewership; the formatting, which was wildly different from normal; and, of course, the, like, diversity, and the movies that were nominated, the movies that won, and just kind of, like, where the Oscars fit into our society. Do they have any importance anymore? I have thoughts.

B: Let's get into it.

Angela: Yes. So, first of all, the ratings for the Oscars were...abysmal is a word that could be used. They drew 9.23 million viewers, which is a 51% drop from last year. So, it is safe to say that people are, I think, tired of watching famous people on Zoom. Although, to be fair, the Oscars weren’t actually on Zoom this year, as opposed to the Emmys. It was very, like, low key and, like, it was in, like, a lounge room that everyone was still in, like, their ball gowns. It was very weird.

B: Mhm.

Angela: But what's interesting is that, like, the Oscars viewership has been declining for years. Like, it's not an uncommon thing, but I think our society's, like, valuing of award shows is going down. I think we're all kind of tired of it, and the Oscars especially has always kind of been a group of famous people gather in a room and congratulate each other.

B: Mhm.

Angela: Especially now where our country is at the moment, and it's a pandemic. A lot of people are going through some really hard times. Maybe it's just not what we needed? And it's crazy that more than half of the normal viewers just didn't watch. And, on the one hand, like, yeah, like a lot of the reason people watch the Oscars is for, like, the red carpets and outfits and the pizzazz and the glamour and all that. And that just—most of that wasn't present in this case.

B: You also mentioned how the Oscars have been on a downward climb. I feel like part of that could just be because of our increasing access to content over the last decade, as opposed to—the biggest Oscar turnout ever, in terms of people tuning in from home, was in 1996 for the “Titanic,” because it was just such a, like...

Angela: Commercial success.

B: Just, like, a huge success. And now, obviously we have blockbusters, but we're shifting away from that. I guess, people, it seems like we might not be as, like, personally invested in these five films from the year because we have this very wide access to whatever we want to watch.

Angela: That’s true. And I think, like, even going back to “Titanic”: one of the crazy things about “Titanic” is that it's a movie that won Best Picture that, like, everyone saw. But, like, blockbuster movies and, like, movies that are, like, popular and fun and just, like...don't win Oscars really anymore. Making the Oscars more elitist is not going to help anything. And a couple of years ago, they did try. Well, they were going to have, like, a Best Popular Movie category and then they decided not to.

B: But I think that having a category for popular films could either be great or it could be kind of like having a category for foreign language films. Which is like, it's great to highlight those films, but what about films that...

Angela: Are popular and also just good?

B: Yeah. You know, you're kind of, like, pigeon-holing something.

Angela: You're, like, othering a thing when it could just all be movies.

B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess that's what you do with any category, but when it's something that you're trying to be more, like, inclusive of, that's a tough question to grapple with, because, like, you'd hope that the Academy would just consider more popular films, but they're going to do what they do. They recently expanded the Academy in an attempt to I think try and be more inclusive, but...

Angela: Yeah. It is a really nice idea to say that, you know, "Oh, we shouldn't need a popular film category because lots of popular films can be good and can be nominated for Oscars." But the simple fact is that, like, they don't get nominated for Oscars. So I don't think a popular film category would be a bad thing, because at least it is doing something about it instead of just saying, "Well, the Academy could nominate popular films and they just don't."

B: It's better than nothing.

Angela: If they want to remain relevant, they need to be relevant.

B: To your point, this research firm, Guts and Data, they found that only 18% of active film watchers—and that includes either in theaters or at home—had heard of the movie “Mank," which was on Netflix and it was actually leading the Oscar race with 10 nominations. Maybe it's because this whole year, the last 15 months, have been very strange, but a lot of people have been using streaming services more, so you'd think that they would be more familiar with something that was released on a streaming platform. But that's not necessarily the case.

Angela: I did want to talk about the formatting for the Oscars, because they really were like, "You know what, this is not going to have like a huge live audience. This is not going to be, like, this huge television spectacle. This is about the movies. Why don't we make it a movie?" They, like, hired Steven Soderbergh. He directed the Oscars, which is a really interesting way to do it, and they mixed up the format a whole lot. I think everyone was really surprised that they announced the Best Director and Best Picture, like, really early in the ceremony, both going to “Nomadland” and “Nomadland”'s director, Chloe Zhao.

But I did also want to talk about the diversity in the Oscars this year because it has been hailed a lot this year as the most diverse Oscars ever. And, like, sure. I mean, we have Chloe Zhao now, who won Best Director and she's the second woman, first woman of color to win Best Director. And that's a huge deal, obviously, it's insane that two women have won Best Director. I don't know. I feel like it's one of those things where a lot of people were nominated. And that's nice. Not a lot of people of color won. But yeah, like, for Best Actor, there was Riz Ahmed, Chadwick Boseman, Steven Yeun, and then also Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman. With Best Actress, it was a big deal. Apparently, this was the first time that two women of color had been nominated for Best Actress.

B: That's pretty sad.

Angela: Yeah, but yeah, like, there are a lot of nominations of people of color. A lot of the people that won were white and a lot of the movies that won were primarily white.

B: Just from reading reviews and articles after the Oscars, I saw some conflicting opinions on whether or not this Oscars was diverse enough or not.

Angela: Yeah. Yeah, all of the movies about, like, Black people that were nominated were, like, historical Black movies, which the Oscars do love. Those are still the movies that are being nominated and you don't get a lot of just, like, stories.

B: Yeah. Yeah well, do you, like, have any final conclusions on what's next for the Oscars? Like, what can we look forward to next year? Are they just going to revert to the way they always did things, and, like, hope that the viewership goes back up? Or maybe, like, there isn't as much of a place for the Oscars anymore, and are we moving in that direction?

Angela: I think that the Oscars are continuing to lose relevancy. I know, earlier in 2020, they, like, instated new rules about, like, what movies are allowed to be nominated and they at least have to have, like, background people of color. And, like, you cannot make a movie that literally has all white people anymore. Which is, like, good. I think it's just not enough. And I definitely think that this format is not going to happen again. If they're going to do anything, they're probably just going to go back to what they have always done. But, yeah, I don't...unless the Oscars, like, really work to make a change and do something different, both in terms of the movies that they value and the movies that they award and in terms of their place in our society and, like, if they want to mean anything or contribute anything, they need to do something different.

B: The crazy thing is over 9 million people watched. That's still a lot of people, and there's a ton of money on the line, too. Because the Academy has a long-term licensing deal with ABC. They collect roughly, like, $900 million between now and 2028 for worldwide broadcasting rights to the Oscars. So there's just like, an unbelievable amount of resources going into putting this on and so, like, how can we make sure that that is worth it, I suppose.

Angela: Yeah. I mean, the Oscars have always just been a spectacle and something to watch. And if people aren't watching, then it's not worth the investment.

B: Yeah, and a huge part of making that money is through ad sales and as viewership goes down, they're going to really struggle to meet that threshold.

So the next thing we wanted to talk about was the recent iOS 14.5 update. Basically, Apple recently announced that their new update would include a new privacy tool, which is called App Tracking Transparency. So, my question for you, Angela...well, do you have an iPhone?

Angela: I do.

B: Have you seen a pop-up recently?

Angela: I have not.

B: Maybe you haven't gotten the update.

Angela: I don't think I have.

B: But I was excited the other day when I received a pop-up when I opened an app asking if I wanted to opt in to tracking in the app, which monitors behavior and shares that data with third parties. So this is the newest feature and the update that people are talking about quite a bit. So just to give a little bit of background: since 2012, Apple has used something called an IDFA, which is an identifier for advertising, which conducts tracking across different websites and apps. And this new feature, App Tracking Transparency, allows us to make our IDFA limited to in-app tracking if we should choose. And I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't something that we weren't necessarily unable to do previously, is to disable this feature. You could, like, really, probably get into the settings of your phone and turn it off for every single app. But App Tracking Transparency, instead of making you opt out of tracking in apps that monitor your behavior and share it with third parties, you're presented with the opportunity to opt in. And so it's kind of flipping that process and making it more convenient for you to not have your data shared with third parties than it is currently, which is pretty inconvenient and takes a bit of time and a bit of digging to opt out of that.

Angela: I appreciate that it seems very user-focused and not putting, like, the apps first and, like, them collecting data, but instead saying, "Hey, maybe if people knew that this was happening, they wouldn't want to do it." Or also just, you know, if we're given the option right there, then maybe we'll say no, but if it's, like, "Oh, I gotta work. I gotta find the thing in my settings"...this is very convenient.

B: And a lot of pro-user privacy people have been really excited about this, because it is a significant step in the right direction when we're thinking about user privacy. Sort of on the other side, some people including, like, app developers, and tech companies, and even some smaller businesses are a little concerned about what this means for their access to user data, which helps them especially when it comes to targeting users. So there is kind of this other side to it.

Angela: It's difficult to sympathize with companies because they're like, "Uh, now we can't collect their data? What will we do?" And it's like, okay, but you can still collect the data of people who want you to collect their data.

B: Right. I mean, this just rolled out, so we don't necessarily know what user reaction is to this in terms of opting in and opting out. This is according to an article on AdWeek: the median opt-in rate so far is about 32% and that was figured out from an analysis of 300 apps across 2,000 devices. The analysis found that apps with higher consumer affinities saw higher opt-in rates but still only around 40%. So we're still waiting to see if that will stay consistent. Bumble, the dating app, it is saying that it expects its opt-in rates to be between zero and 20%, and so they're saying that 10% of the 12 million ad opportunities per second on its platform are tied to that identifier, IDFA, our, like, advertisement identifier. So apps on that scale, I can only think are going to suffer from this in terms of their access to data.

Angela: Yeah.

B: That same AdWeek article said that one developer told them that their company is bracing for, like, a 9% revenue hit in the short term. Facebook, of course, has come out and said that they are very against this. They've come out and said that it's really going to hurt small businesses.

Angela: Yeah.

B: Which is funny, because, like, it's Facebook. So for anyone who's interested in this particular topic, I would recommend listening to CI to Eye, which is Capacity Interactive's podcast. They just did an episode on this. They speak a little bit about how this is concerning for, say, an arts organization who had previously been tracking user behavior across apps and across websites in order to use their limited advertising budgets efficiently. When you take away your ability to measure user behavior across apps, you're taking away some of your ability to, like, optimize campaigns that you would have been able to previously. When you have a really limited budget for using your advertising dollars, you have to be extra careful about how you're spending it, and so the more metrics you have, the easier it can be. But they provide some good sort of suggestions, and one of the things they talked about was, like, it's not like you're having less engagement, you just are having a harder time measuring.

Angela: Mhm.

B: It's like, you're just a little bit more limited in terms of seeing how users behave. That behavior is not necessarily being taken away, so you can't necessarily rely on your ROI measures as much as you would have once done that. So one thing that they really suggested was really focusing on in-app measurements, looking at, like, engagements and engagement rates within apps, and then also being really mindful about how organizations are investing in the actual, like, creation of the content. Because if you're worried about being able to appeal to audiences in terms of what you're putting out on an app, you really want to be effective in the content itself because we can't rely on these measures quite as much. Yeah, you just want to make people stop in their tracks, you know? So, yeah, in the end, it is a success in terms of user privacy and I think that's something to be celebrated, personally.

Angela: I just feel like people are more of a priority than, like, businesses. And so if people don't want you sharing their data, that's kind of the end of the conversation. It's not that this can't hurt small businesses and not that we shouldn't figure out other ways to help them. But, I don't know, I feel like if a company is relying on, like, tracking user data, that's not a good system.

B: Yeah, I mean, that is how a lot of marketers...

Angela: Yeah, I mean, like, that's how our system works, but I just don't think that's good.

B: Yeah, like, in-app, that's totally different, because you're willingly using the app and navigating through it and that's part of, I think, what we accept when we use a platform now. But in terms of tracking our behavior and sharing it with third-party apps, that gets a little bit, like, just ickier...to use a mature word. And the Facebook thing is really funny, because, like, some people are saying that the change is, like, actually going to hurt Facebook more than anyone else. So it's funny that they've come out against it saying it's going to be for small businesses. But, like, the sort of assumption there is that a lot of Facebook users are going to opt out now that they're being presented with this option. So, yeah, keep an eye out for that pop up.

Angela: Yeah I'll let you know. So, to our lovely audience members: this is our last Let's Talk with B and I. Thank you so much for tuning in.

B: Angela, our Podcast Producer, thank you so much for an amazing year of content and conversations. I always really enjoyed coming together to do these Let's Talks every single month, so thank you. Just so our listeners know, you can stay tuned. The Let's Talk series will continue through the summer and I'll be involved in that through the summer, as well, so you'll be hearing more of me. But yeah, thank you, Angela. We'll miss you a lot.

Angela: Thanks for listening to the AMT Lab podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and to leave a comment. If you would like to learn more, go to amt-lab.org. That is A-M-T dash L-A-B .org. Or, you can email us at amtlabcmu@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at Tech in the Arts, or on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn at Arts Management and Technology Lab. You can find the resources that we referenced today in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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