Let’s talk more about Netflix and its Watch Instantly service. If you’re like me and you’ve ordered yourself a Roku box, or if you prefer the old fashioned form of watching on your computer, either plugged into a TV or not, then you’ve probably found yourself spending way too much time perusing the Netflix instant viewing catalog, either to end up with way too many choices to pick just one, or without anything that seems good to watch. If you’re one of those people, I’d like to offer some suggestions for you, to help structure your wanderings.

The Good

First, some areas in which to focus. As Netflix continues to add to their catalog, there are a few areas that are already full of good choices. Let’s talk about those first.

The Classics

I think this is the best genre in their catalog. There are tons of classic films and television shows. Some of the big ones that you may have already seen (college film class anyone?) - Casablanca, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rebel Without a Cause, The Seven Year Itch, Ben-Hur, Giant, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Exorcist. If you haven’t seen these, this is a good place to start. Then, there are all the movies you’ve wanted to watch, but that never made it to the top of your list. Or maybe these are movies you’ve never heard of, but should definitely check out. Movies like Bullitt, Shaft, Five Easy Pieces, Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, The General, The Wild Bunch, East of Eden, The Searchers, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The World of Henry Orient, Harvey. And the sci-fi selection is great; it includes both the good ones and the ones that are so bad they’re good. There’s Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, A Boy and His Dog, Forbidden Plant, The Road Warrior, The Omega Man, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Eraserhead, Soylent Green. Lots of great camp from the 50s and 60s, too. Try 20 Million Miles to Earth, Astro Zombies, or Mars Needs Women. In addition, check out the work of a few Hollywood icons:

• Stanley Kubrick - 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Killing, Barry Lyndon, Eyes Wide Shut
• Alfred Hitchcock - Vertigo, The Birds, Saboteur, The Trouble with Harry, Torn Curtain, Dial M for Murder
• Cary Grant - Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Charade, I Was a Male War Bride, Holiday
• Clint Eastwood: Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, Every Which Way But Loose, Letters from Iwo Jima, Absolute Power

Then there’s the classic television. Shows like Magnum P.I., The Rockford Files, Leave It to Beaver, Miami Vice, The A-Team, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Saved by the Bell. Lots of stuff to choose from, no matter if your preference trends toward the 1950s, 60s, 70s or 80s. Speaking of television, this is another area Netflix has done well so far.

Television

The television selection has something to please everyone. Of course there’s lots of crap, but there are lots of gems, too. If you’ve managed to never see The Office - both British and American versions - here’s your chance to catch up. There are a number of excellent HBO and Showtime programs, like Dexter, Weeds, Dead Like Me, and The L Word. Other good contemporary shows include 30 Rock, Heroes, Law and Order, Coupling, NewsRadio. There is also lots of sci-fi. Quantum Leap, Dr. Who, Sliders, The Outer Limits, and Battlestar Galactica. There are many seasons of many of these, so there’s plenty to watch instantly. Then there are the A&E and BBC miniseries - Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice, North and South, and a number of other Victorian era dramas. There are shows from the National Geographic and History Channels, as well as tons of other science, history and nature shows.

Independent and Smaller Releases

There are lots of choices in the independent category. Independent films can be really quirky and sweet, funny and smart, or they can also be complete crap, so navigate this category carefully. Some to check out on Netflix would be The King of Kong, Orgazmo, Chalk, King of California, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Ten, Living in Oblivion, Sherrybaby, Conversations with Other Women. There are many others though, depending on your tastes, so look around.

Documentaries

I don’t know much about this genre, but there are myriad choices in the documentary section. From some of the bigger box office successes like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Born into Brothels, Spellbound, Super Size Me, and March of the Penguins to smaller releases like Cocaine Cowboys, Maxed Out, The Business of Being Born, Promises, Fidel, there are documentaries on hundreds of different topics.

The Bad

Now, some areas to avoid. You’ve probably heard this complaint from other people; there are a few areas in which Netflix has not yet compiled a compelling collection for instant watching. Here are some of those.

New Blockbusters

This is the biggest complaint most people have about Netflix’s instant watching service. I’m sure it’s difficult and expensive to acquire the rights to stream most new releases. As such, there aren’t many to see. I watched the Orphanage recently, if that counts. Some other new releases include La Vie en Rose, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Pan’s Labyrinth, Conspiracy, but none of them huge blockbusters. There are more older big movies - think along the lines of Lethal Weapon, The Last of the Mohicans, A Fish Called Wanda, Cocoon, Mannequin, The Fifth Element. Well, besides Lethal Weapon, I’m not sure I’d call most of those “blockbusters,” but they are a bit more mainstream. In general, there’s just not a lot of these kinds of movies available with the instant watching service.

Comedies

Other than the comedy television shows, and the independent and classic films I’ve discussed, many of the movies classified as comedy are pretty terrible. There are a few fun ones, though. Like Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Team America: World Police, and Beetlejuice. There’s lots of standup, if that interests you. But very little contemporary comedy.

So, overall, there’s lots of good stuff you can watch instantly with Netflix. It’s certainly not perfect, but it is a great addition to the DVD delivery portion of their business. I think it’s especially good for catching up on movies and TV shows you might have missed (or those from before you were born). And if you have any additions to this list, leave them in the comments! I’d very much like for this to be a useful resource.

How many times, when you log into Facebook or FriendFeed or Twitter, do you see new photos of a friend’s “amazing” vacation or her glowing review of a “fantastic” new restaurant she found? Sure, it’s great to keep up with what your friends are doing, but when you’re continually presented with these selective portrayals of everyone’s wonderful lives, it can start to wear on you.

Social desirability bias is most certainly part of this. We want to present ourselves to others in a positive way; that’s just part of life. I do this as much as anyone. For example, I post vacation and party photos on Flickr, but I never post anything that shows the regular or negative parts of my life. Who wants to see or read about me sitting on the couch with my laptop or being stressed out about work? Furthermore, why would I want anyone to have to?

But this can lead to a pretty weird public version of our personal lives. Tools like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and the rest allow us to selectively present a sanitized and upbeat picture of our lives. If you knew me only from my Flickr stream, you’d think I was quite the popular, active world traveler. In reality, I travel occasionally and attend various social events, but I spend most of my time quietly at home with my husband or with a few close friends.

This is fine; there’s nothing wrong with a bit of image management and personal public relations. But always being faced with these near-perfect portrayals of everyone else’s lives can wear on us. We compare our lives to the lives of those around us and we want that comparison to end up in our favor. Leon Festinger talked about this idea of social comparison half a century ago, long before we had the constant status updates and public profiles we do now. We tend to compare ourselves to similar others, and when we don’t measure up that makes us feel bad, even competitive.

We want to reduce this cognitive dissonance; most people hate to feel bad. We reduce dissonance in a number of ways, some healthy, some not. We can choose to reframe the way we think about something (”It’s okay if I’m not traveling the world right now; I’m saving up to buy a new house”), we can discredit the source of our dissonance (”Joe’s an idiot for spending so much money on that new TV”), we can change our behaviors (”If it bothers me to see other people having so much fun camping, then maybe I should go camping more”). But the feeling will come back; we will always compare ourselves to others.

What’s the opposite of schadenfreude? I can’t really think of a word that means feeling bad when something good happens to someone else. It’s more than envy or jealousy; it’s feeling that you’re somehow not living up to this social comparison. You don’t want what the other person has, but you want more for yourself. I don’t know, maybe that is jealousy.

Either way, I wonder what Leon Festinger and his social psychology colleagues in the 1950s would think of applying their ideas to something like Twitter. Bet they never pictured it.

With the release of Roku’s Netflix Player earlier this week, and all the subsequent blogosphere chatter, I thought it might be interesting for me to explore my own relationship with Netflix’s Instant Watching service. Because I can say, completely without hyperbole, this service has changed my life. Well, the entertainment consumption part of my life, anyway, and that’s a really big part.

First, some background. I started using the Instant Watching service as soon as it became available to me. Hayes and I have been Netflix subscribers for several years now, and we got access to the Instant Watching service in March 2007. And since Netflix keeps track of our viewing activity, I can easily see what I’ve watched since - turns out I’ve watched more than 214 hours of instant content in the past 15 months. This is in addition to the DVDs we get in the mail.

Also, I love movies and television. I’m not a huge fan of sitting down and watching two hours of uninterrupted primetime TV; I’m pretty particular about what I like and quite frankly, most television sucks. But when I find something I like, I will watch it over and over and over again. We own literally hundreds of DVDs, and I’ve watched most of these multiple, sometimes even dozens of, times.

Now before you start wondering where I find the time to watch that much stuff, I want to share something about how I watch this content. I really like to have a movie or TV show on while I’m working (and I work from home), but if I’m watching something new or interesting, it tends to be distracting (duh). So my strategy is to put in something I’ve seen before, so I don’t have to pay much attention to it, but I still have something there. Normally I’ll turn on a season of Arrested Development or Futurama, or maybe a movie like Office Space or the Royal Tenebaums, but Netflix has so many other choices. Of course, if I have to concentrate or do serious writing work, then I’ll turn everything off. Also, I have two big widescreen monitors, so I have enough screen real estate to share some with a video.

When the Netflix Instant Watching service was first released to users with my particular subscription type, I was limited to fifteen hours a month of free viewing. I used that up every month. I was very particular about what I would use my time on; I remember thinking, “I shouldn’t rewatch that episode of 30 Rock, because I’ve already seen it a few times already. I should watch something new.” I watched mostly movies during that time. The selection of classic films is great. They also have a lot of independent and documentary films.

Now that I have unlimited viewing, I use it for two main things. One, I’ve found it’s great for watching television shows. I have watched a few of my favorite shows over and over, namely 30 Rock and the early seasons of The Office (both the British and American versions). I actually own these DVDs, but I still will watch them on Netflix when I’m at my computer. I watched the first two seasons of News Radio, and got a surprising amount of enjoyment from John Ritter’s show Hearts Afire. I caught up on missed seasons of shows I like such as Heroes, Weeds and Dexter, saw the premiere episode of Californication, and tried out shows I’d never seen like The Tick, The Tudors, Facts of Life. If I were so inclined, I could even watch season after season of Dr. Who and Saved by the Bell.

In addition, Hayes and I have caught up on all kinds of really excellent campy sci-fi films from the 1940s-1970s. From the classics like Planet of the Apes and Plan 9 From Outer Space to the lesser known, but still wonderful in their own way, movies like Dinosaurs! and Mars Needs Women, it’s been great to have all of these available to us anytime we want. We watched A Boy and His Dog last week. It was highly entertaining, and has possibly the best and worst last line of a movie ever.

I personally don’t see a problem with the “limited” supply of movies offered by the Instant Watching service. There are new movies every day, and the choices are already pretty staggering. There is so much to pick from that it seems like it would be hard to not find something you’d want to watch. If all you ever watch is brand new blockbusters, you will be disappointed, but if that’s all you like, then I might suggest you expand your movie-watching horizons anyway. There are a number of new movies in other genres. And so much good, older stuff to catch up on! Think of all the movies you’ve missed throughout and before your lifetime. This is great for that.

Up to this point, Hayes and I have been simply plugging one of our laptops into the TV when we want to watch something together. The Roku player is going to make that process so much easier. I think entertainment content should be on-demand and always accessible, so I am very excited. DVDs are so 2000; streaming content is the future. I for one welcome our Netflix Instant Watching overlords.

Does it seem like the web is trending toward the less anonymous? This is probably one of those questions that can be answered with a “maybe to some extent, but maybe you’re also just paying more attention to it” type answer. So, let’s discuss it a bit.

It does seem like in the early days of the internet, there was lots of talk about the equalizing force of the web, where people could log on and be anyone they wanted to be. They could create completely new identities online and express themselves in ways their physical bodies never let them. You could log into a chat room and be anonymous or at the very least, pseudonymous. This was often encouraged for a variety of reasons - freedom, flexibility, safety, etc…

But now, in the new web age of social networking and interactive media, who you are online is often not that different from who you are in real life. In fact, some of the hottest new applications are all about connecting people in the real world. Take services like Dodgeball and Brightkite, for example. Their sole purpose is to share a user’s physical location with friends. (Sidenote: that happened to me today. I was in a coffee shop, and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Are you jdeeringdavis?” I was a bit startled, but it turns out this guy lives in the neighborhood and saw that I checked in here on Brightkite. He wasn’t a stalker, just a friendly guy who said hi, got his smoothie and left. I see he’s now swimming at Bull Creek Park.)

Do more people use their real names and actual photos for profiles more now than they used to? I don’t know. But it sure seems like people are more willing to share actual real-life information about themselves online. Maybe we’re more secure, more trusting with the web in general than we used to be. Maybe we’ve come to realize that online social networking and profiles are actually pretty powerful personal public relations tools, and it makes sense to link them to our physical identities.

Or maybe I’m making this all up and nothing has changed. Actual social trends are pretty hard to identify. And to think, I posted all this under my real name. How potentially embarrassing.

I finally got around to reading “Uses of Blogs” today, a book I picked up at the AOIR conference in Brisbane back in September 2006. I should have read this book sooner; it was a relevant and stimulating treatment of blogging.

I found the chapters on blogging in PR and academia most interesting (go figure). A couple weeks ago, I started a sort of apprenticeship with an Austin-based web marketing consultant. So far, I’ve learned a lot about marketing and public relations online. I’m more interested in the PR aspects of this kind of work, but it’s great to learn about the marketing side of things, too. Anyway, I’m coming to realize the importance of good content to a successful marketing and PR effort. Trevor Cook’s chapter about PR emphasizes this point.

In his chapter, Cook also discusses the always on, conversational nature of PR online. Blogs play an important role in the “dialogue” of contemporary public relations by allowing practitioners to interact with publics in a real-time, one-to-one, permanent space. Blogs allow practitioners to create relationships with individuals and not just broadcast dumbed-down messages to mass audiences. Lots of good stuff in that chapter, and I will definitely be coming back to some of these ideas.

The chapters about blogging in academia focused on issues of collaboration and intellectual discourse, transparency and hierarchy. Specifically, Jill Walker’s chapter about blogging inside the ivory tower focuses on issues related to a scholar’s position in the academic hierarchy and her online interactions. Interestingly, Walker thinks grad students are in the best position to blog openly (and under their real names) about both the academic process and the content they study. I don’t disagree with that; I certainly have used this blog for exploring a range of topics, including research ideas, the process of earning a Ph.D., personal interests, etc… It does seem like the various responsibilities of a faculty or administrative position could dampen an individual’s desire to be completely free and open with blog content. As a student, however, I don’t really feel that pressure. I certainly don’t feel like my blog will negatively impact my dissertation process or job prospects. I guess we’ll see about that soon enough…

Overall, this book was a pretty quick read, and some of the chapters were more relevant to me than others. But it got me thinking in different ways about issues I think a lot about already.

In a TechCrunch post today, Michael Arrington noted that Twitter may suck in terms of downtime and outages, but we need it too much to switch to a competing service that works better (or more often). His post is great and really sums up what I’ve been feeling, mainly that Twitter is quickly becoming invaluable to me.

I’m still developing my network on Twitter, but already it’s one of the main ways I communicate throughout the day. Forgot updating my IM away messages and Facebook status - I just post a new tweet. It’s a single message that gets propagated throughout my web profiles, so everyone knows what I’m up to. Also, Twitter has given me a space to have quick chats with people I might not normally talk very often. It’s not an IM, it’s not an email, it’s not a blog. It’s all of these and it’s none of them. I’m making new friends in Austin by finding and interacting with them on Twitter. I’m keeping up with old friends in other, distant cities by following them on Twitter. I post mini restaurant and shop reviews on Twitter.

So, I guess it’s official. I’m addicted. This is way better than Facebook.