C3 Research Memo: Assumption Hunters by Grant McCracken
edited by Prof. Henry Jenkins, Prof. William Uricchio and Daniel Pereira
Now available on the C3/FOE website:
Assumption Hunters: A New Profession for the Corporation in the Throes of Structural Change
A C3 Research Memo by
Grant McCracken
Consulting Practitioner, Convergence Culture Consortium (C3);
Futures of Entertainment Fellow
Download the entire research memo.
Editor's Note
In this, the penultimate C3 research memo, C3
consulting practitioner Grant McCracken takes us on a journey through decades
of seminal organizational and management theory (as well as cultural
anthropology, economics, etc.). In
doing so, McCracken places the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program curriculum
(with its commitment to theory) and the Convergence Culture Consortium's
"practice" model in their rightful place at the center of a discussion of
how best the corporation (when attempting, by necessity or crisis, to enact
structural change) should recognize patterns and excavate assumptions embedded
within the culture of an organization.
McCracken argues that MIT CMS theory and C3 practice (deeply rooted in the liberal arts, the humanities and the qualitative social sciences) are a vital institutional locus and methodological framework, respectively, for the continuous recognition of these patterns and for the hunting down of these assumptions.
Throughout the memo, Grant references thought leaders, public intellectuals and authors from a variety of disciplines. Due to the variety of professional backgrounds and academic disciplines of the C3 readership, some references may not be familiar to everyone. As a result, the format for citing works and authors throughout the memo is as follows: authors are referenced by their name (at times simply by their last name) and a year of publication in parentheses (xxxx).
For example:
"Henry Jenkins (1992) changes the way we
think "media" mediates. Another industry is upended. Richard Florida (2003) says creativity is not an ancillary of the
marketplace, but its prime mover."
A "Works Cited" section has also been provided (organized alphabetically) at the end of this memo.
- dtpereira
Introduction
I read recently that the thing that keeps CEOs awake at
night is "discontinuous innovation" of the kind Clay Christensen (1997) describes. This struck me as odd because
Christensen's discontinuity isn't hard to recognize or anticipate. (His model says: an incumbent offers
more value than customers want, and a competitor responds with products that
are cheaper but "good enough.") Scary,
to be sure, but how does it count as a sleep stealer? There's nothing particularly mysterious
or unmanageable here.
Surely, the scarier thing for a CEO to discover is that the world has changed in a way that defies his or her deepest assumptions. This change is hard to detect. And when detected, it is hard to respond to. I would have thought that in a Schumpeterian (2009) world of creative destruction, this is more likely and the more problematical event (Handy 1991). Let's call it "structural change."
Every corporation, every act of commerce, is predicated on a set of assumptions. These are the infrastructure of all thought and even the most instrumental action. Every enterprise is, as Drucker (2006) and Levitt (1960) demonstrated, shot through with assumptions, some witting, most not. [1]
These assumptions aren't just technically invisible. They are deliberately invisible. In turns out that some knowledge is more powerful the more deeply it is assumed. (So says Gregory Bateson [1972].) Indeed, the more we use an idea, the more completely it disappears from view. Thus do our deepest ideas "go without saying." Semi-deep ideas can be evoked with a single 'buzz word." They are "built in" or, as Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan (2004) prefer, "locked in."
In a perfect world, these assumptions would float to the surface upon expiration. As fish do. But they don't. So we keep using them. These assumptions are deeply implicated in the way we see the world. They can be and have been stuff of our best hunches and most powerful intuitions. Breaking up is hard to do.
What provokes assumption failure? Where does structural change come from? Some of it comes from the ceaseless innovation of the world. Dupont introduces something called "plastic." James Black finds a new way to make pharmaceuticals. Or Mr. Newmark invents Craig's List. We doze for a moment and there's a fast food industry. We doze a moment more and there's a slow food movement. (American markets are like the weather, or for that matter the markets, in Ireland. Wait a moment, they will change. ) Even as these innovations make themselves visible on the surface of the marketplace, in a less obvious way they attack our deepest assumptions
Some structural change comes from the academic and the management literature. The authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto (2000) say "advertising is not messaging, it's conversation." An industry turns on its ear. Henry Jenkins (1992) changes the way we think "media" mediates. Another industry is upended. Richard Florida (2003) says creativity is not an ancillary of the marketplace, but it's prime mover. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore (1999) say, "You are not making products or services. You're making experiences."
Whatever else they do, these ideas contradict a fundamental assumption of capitalism, that the business of business is making things. Each in their way, Drucker (2006), Michael Porter (1998), Thomas Stewart (2001) and others anticipated this assault on literalism. We are not "making things to make money," they said. We are "creating value to capture value." And with this fundamental change, new process and practice is set in train, and the world begins to drift.
Structural change also comes from practice. It emerges from things happening in the marketplace, the corporation, or the world of the consumer. This change is not created or officiated by experts. (Unless of course that expert is Oprah.) It comes swimming up out of the interactions of many parties, driven by various motives, parties who may not be aware of the intentions or even the presence of others.
Take the case of the American "great room." In the last 25 years, millions of Americans knocked down the walls between kitchen, living room, and dining room. They spent many hundreds of millions of dollars, in the process turning their homes into construction zones. The great room did not from the design community or even an Oprah episode. It came from Americans, flying by the seat of their pants, trying to figure out a way to accommodate emerging notions of children, childhood, child rearing, domesticity, parenthood, feminism, informality, media consumption, dining, hospitality, weekends, entertainment, cooking, serving, and food. So much for our assumptions about the American family.
Implications
There are several steps the corporation can take to protect itself from structural change.
Scan the horizon
Watch for changes in the world that will test and perhaps overturn the
assumptions in the corporation. The
disintermediation of the supply chain, what will this mean to our assumptions
about distribution? More specifically,
what happens when Amazon.com begins to eliminate bricks and mortar retails and
the Mall? Is there a "New Normal"
that defines consumer taste and preference and what would it mean to our
assumptions about what consumers want? The corporation needs to examine the future, and to anticipate how it
will challenge present assumptions (McCracken, 2009).
Excavate the assumptions of the corporation
2.1 Excavate Management model
These models sweep through the corporation with some frequency: "excellence"
from Peters and Waterman (2004), "reengineering" from Hammer and Champy (2004),
"built to last" from Collins and Porras (2003). These models, with their key
phrases and characteristic points of view, reform the corporate culture and the
minds of managers (Collins 2000, Davenport and Prusak 2003, Gray 2003, Hindle
2008, Martin 2009, Micklethwait and Wooldridge 1998, Sapir 1977, Sutton 1997).
There is no "sunset clause" for management models.
[2]
We may stop using the model, but rarely
do we repudiate it. The model is
still there, passive and invisible. Occasionally it will "reactivate" without warning. Someone will object to "strategy A" on
the grounds that "I can't see what this has to do with excellence." Everyone
recognizes the term. They know it
as a value that corporation once valued. So people are inclined to defer. "Excellence. Good
point. Let's move on." Too bad. Because "strategy A" was a good idea.
2.2 Excavate the local culture of the
corporation.
The local culture of the corporation has many sources: the vision of the
founder, ideas introduced through mergers and acquisitions, cataclysmic events
in the history of the corporation (public ones like the depression of the
1920s, and private ones like the time the CFO decamped with the corporate
"playbook"), and the culture of the locality (Silicon Valley vs. New York City
vs. Austin, Texas). Here too we
have a variety of old and new ideas pouring into the corporation. The old live on. The new recruit vigorously. The corporation hums with a variety of
ideas, some visible, all active.
2.3 Excavate the culture of the component
professions.
There are many professional paths to the business world. People come up as engineers, MBAs, entrepreneurs, accountants, industrial designers, graphic designers, liberal arts graduates. Each of these professions imbues the graduate with a certain way of seeing the world, of solving a problem (Khurana 2010). (I did a project for a Canadian telecom and the marketer expressed her frustration with the engineers with whom we were working, "Every time I leave them in a room together, they start building a machine!") In a perfect world, the corporation would achieve a miracle of ecumenical cooperation. More often, certain professional cultures are given more influence than others. So we need the various professional assumptions and the value hierarchy that distribute their power.
2.4 Excavate the culture of the industry.
Every industry has characteristic ways and means. The car culture of Detroit, the start up
culture of Silicon Valley, the P&G method as it has influenced the world of
CPG (consumer packaged goods), the engineering cultures of IBM and GE, the new
approaches emerging from the likes of Etsy and Zappos. Furthermore, every industry is various. Some part of the financial world sees
itself as "white shoe." Another is
"Florsheim." Still another is "hush
puppy." These assumptions need
mapping. To be sure, they build
consensus and confer strength. But
they also create vulnerability when change happens.
2.5 Excavate the culture of business.
The world of business has certain shared assumptions (Kanter 1993). We are inclined to share a certain way
of defining the actor, the action, the motive, the objective, the unit of
analysis. These appear to be
matters of simple rationality. But
of course the differences between Japanese, American, and Canadian business
practice tell us that cultural choice shapes this rationality. Furthermore, there is a range of choice
within the rational. There are many
ways, in that horrible phrase, to skin a cat.
The key problem: one rationality may conceal another, as they discovered recently at IBM. Kevin Clark, then Director of IBM Alumni Relations and the Greater IBM Connection, noticed that IBM was insisting on the boundaries of the corporation perhaps a little too literally. The fact of the matter is that Information Technology is a small world. Sooner or later everyone in the industry is going to work for IBM. And this means that it's wrong of IBM to treat outsiders as outsiders. Clark noticed, for instance, that when people left IBM, IBM was inclined to severe the relationship. Clark believed the more sensible approach was to treat them as "temporarily relocating," and to keep the relationship alive.
The culture of business encourages the corporation to insist on an emphatic boundary when indeed something more porous is sometimes called for. Only the retrieval of business assumptions renders this opportunity visible. The task here is to find the assumption and to release the corporation from its thrall. This is what Henry Jenkins' did with his notion of "transmedia." We can see how many ideas take their powers of illumination and the ability to create value from their ability to transcend the assumptions of the moment. This category has many examples including, again, Henry Jenkins' (2008) notion of "transmedia," C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan (2008) on the notion of "cocreation," Charles Handy (1984) on the future of work and Warren Bennis (2009) on the nature of leadership.
Professional Development
Who will do this? Who will dig out assumptions for the corporations? The Liberal Arts ought to be a superb recruiting ground for this new profession. One could argue that the ability to find and scrutinize assumptions is the great gift part of the liberal arts education. But of course this part of the university continues to sneer at anything attached to commerce as beneath its dignity and corrupted by gainful motive (Nussbaum 2010). The move to post-modernism compounds the problem by insisting on the instability of knowledge and the inscrutability of the world (Swaim, 2010). A.G. Lafley (2008) has called for a "hard headed humanist" but hard headed humanists are in short supply.
The management consultant may not be the right person to undertake this work, but we have much to learn from the Bains and McKinseys of the world. The consulting houses are good at working from faint signals and approximate measures, at living with noisy data sets and problems that might as well be shape-shifters they are so fluid and changeable. We need to learn these methods and approaches, which is another way to say that we need to learn how to deal with the world when it is merely ignited by ideas and not very much comprehended by them.
A profession of this kind will need an institutional locus. To be sure, there are inklings and experiments. Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio (2010) have created something remarkable at CMS, and Henry Jenkins' experiment continues at the Annenberg School at USC. David Kelley is creating something interesting at the Design Program at Stanford as is Joel M. Podolny at Apple University. Peter Drucker left behind an inclusive experiment at the Claremont University business school named for him. [3]
If we dolly back a little further, another opportunity emerges: the creation of a consulting house that makes the pattern recognition of the arts, humanities and social sciences an integral part of the advice it gives to business. Here too there are inklings and experiments. And a question: why only these?
Works Cited
Anonymous. n.d. "Mission and Vision." Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management: Mission and Vision. http://www.cgu.edu/pages/290.asp (Accessed September 6, 2010).
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind; collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Chandler Publishing.
Bennis, Warren. 2009. On Becoming a Leader. Fourth Edition, Fourth Edition. Basic Books.
Carpenter, Edmund. 1976. Oh What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! Flamingo.
Christensen, Clayton M. 1997. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business School Press.
Collins, David. 2000. Management Fads and Buzzwords: Critical-Practical Perspectives. Routledge.
Collins, Jim, and Jerry I. Porras. 2004. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. HarperBusiness.
Davenport, Thomas H., and Laurence Prusak. 2003. What's the Big Idea? Creating and Capitalizing on the Best New Management Thinking. Harvard Business School Press.
Drucker, Peter F. 2006. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Harper Paperbacks.
Florida, Richard. 2003. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Basic Books.
Foster, Richard, and Sarah Kaplan. 2004. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market--And How to Successfully Transform Them. Reprint. Crown Business.
Gray, David. 2003. "Wanted: Chief Ignorance Officer." Harvard Business Review. November. http://hbr.org/2003/11/wanted-chief-ignorance-officer/ar/1.
Hammer, Michael, and James Champy. 2004. Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. Rev Upd. Collins Business.
Handy, Charles. 1985. The Future of Work. Blackwell Publishers.
Handy, Charles. 1991. The Age of Unreason. Harvard Business Press.
Hindle, Tim. 2008. Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus. Bloomberg Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Revised. NYU Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2007. "From YouTube to YouNiversity." Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives. http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/02/from_youtube_to_youniversity.html (Accessed September 6, 2010).
Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 1993. Men and Women of the Corporation: new edition. Basic Books.
Khurana, Rakesh. 2010. From Higher Aims to
Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the
Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton University
Press.
Lafley, A.G., and Ram Charan. 2008. The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation. Crown Business.
Levine,
Frederick with Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberg. 2000. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business
as Usual. Perseus Publishing.
Levitt, Theodore. 1960. "Marketing Myopia". Harvard Business Review 38, no. 4 (July August): 45-56.
Martin, Roger L. 2009. Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking. Harvard Business Press.
McCracken, Grant. 2009. Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. Basic Books.
Micklethwait, John, and Adrian Wooldridge. 1998. The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus. Three Rivers Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2010. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton University Press.
Peters, Thomas J., and Robert H. Waterman. 2004. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. Harper Paperbacks.
Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage. Harvard Business Press.
Porter, Michael E. 1998. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. Free Press.
Prahalad, C.K., and M.S. Krishnan. 2008. The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks. McGraw-Hill.
Sapir, David J. 1977. The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays of the Anthropology of Rhetoric. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 2009. Can Capitalism Survive? Creative Destruction and the Future of the Global Economy. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Stewart, Thomas A. 2001. The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization. Doubleday Business.
Sutton, Robert I. 1997. Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company. Free Press.
Swaim, Barton. 2010. "Human Errors." Times Literary Supplement. No. 5616, November 16.
Uricchio, William. 2010. "Introductory Statement." in CMS 10th Anniversary. May 7.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Daniel Pereira for his thoughts on the original version of this C3 Research Memo.
About the Author
[1] Drucker, Peter F. 2006. The Practice of Management. Harper Paperbacks, p. 50. Levitt, Theodore. 1960. "Marketing Myopia." Harvard Business Review 38:45-56.
[2] "In public policy, a sunset provision or sunset clause is a provision in a statute or regulation that terminates or repeals all or portions of the law after a specific date, unless further legislative action is taken to extend it." Anonymous. n.d., Sunset Provision. Wikipedia entry.
[3] "Reflecting the Drucker philosophy of management, we believe that management is a human enterprise—an art as well as a science—that integrates perspectives from the social and behavioral sciences, from philosophy and the humanities, from history and technology, and from religion and mathematics. This liberal art of management brings together the complex realities of the world in which we live, our diverse cultural, institutional, and intellectual backgrounds, and our ethical responsibilities." Anonymous. n.d. "Mission and Vision." Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management: Mission and Vision Statement. Claremont University. http://www.cgu.edu/pages/290.asp (Accessed September 6, 2010)
C3 Research Memo: Watching with the World - Television Audiences and Online Social Networks by Alex Leavitt
Watching with the World: Television Audiences and Online Social Networks
by Alex Leavitt
Research Specialist for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), 2009 - 2011; Futures of Entertainment Fellow
Download the
executive summary or the
entire research memo.
What is the Television Audience?
The landscape of television technology today is in constant fluctuation. With the development of Internet-based technology combined with broadcast television – everything from the DVR to IPTV to Over The Top (OTT) options like Netflix and YouTube – the options for television distribution and consumption are numerous and fragmented. The television audience also has experienced fragmentation, across cable networks (Napoli 2003) and now away from traditional broadcast schedules, turning instead to online options like Hulu. So how do we define the television audience in an era of chaos?
The television audience has been conceptualized along various theoretical and practical lines. Both Ang (1991) and Mosco (1996) argue that the television audience is a product of the industry, lacking any social context beyond demographic groupings. Ang (1991) notes that, over twenty years ago, characterized through a representative ratings system, the actual viewers watching television were invisible conceptually and technologically to the television industry. In a much different televisual area, today it is more valuable to look at practices like information sharing to define audiences. While the industry has adopted more detailed studies, such as the use of focus groups to calibrate concepts, examining practices invokes further theoretical issues. Lunt and Livingstone (1996) question whether the audience should be defined as a group of individuals that share common behaviors of watching TV or as a collective that engages with one another. If characterized by group dynamics, Livingstone (1998) also asks if the audience represents a unified group or a diverse set of subgroups. In response, I approach the label of “audience” as a malleable category that encompasses varying behaviors yet unifies diverse participants around media and information while moving beyond statistical extrapolations and outdated abstractions.
The ratings systems that dominate the television industry fix the television audience as a group that exhibits one behavior: watching television programming. However, media audiences actually exhibit a range of practices beyond mere viewing, such as evaluating media, discussing topics socially, generating content, sharing information, attending fan events, and even leaving the room during a TV show. While the concept of television audiences as constructed by television ratings remains valuable for certain purposes, it does not account for the diverse range of behaviors in which audiences participate. These other behaviors beyond simply watching television are valuable for understanding how and why viewers connect with and mobilize around media content, providing more productive feedback about audience interest and value.
Media institutions define audiences by exposure, but these metrics only account for estimations of audiences and do not reflect why audiences are drawn to certain content. C3 Researcher Sheila Seles (2010) instead calls for the industry to recognize audience expression over impression because expressive behaviors show why audiences engage in the first place: “[I]nstead of letting the outmoded concept of “exposure” or the Internet misnomer “impression” dictate the value of the audience, we need to understand TV viewing as an expressive process.”
This C3 research memo aims to address the expressive and participatory practices of online television audiences. Television audience participation online has been radically shifting to new forms of practice over the past decade as more and more users interact with the Web and other Internet-connected services. Prior to these recent trends, most participation online revolved around television “communities,” where fans primarily interacted with other fans. However, with the rise of social network sites, viewers are constructing a more-social ecosystem that will affect how current and future audiences engage and identify with television content. Rather than a group of likeminded strangers, users on social network sites (SNS) are connected to others they know. Likewise, SNS provide opportunities to perceive trends across large populations and wide ranges of viewers. By mapping out the evolution of television audiences’ participatory spaces and practices, this memo outlines the evolving technical and social ecosystem that mediates audience participation online.
Summary and Implications
To examine in depth the value of online audiences, this memo has looks at the development of and research about Internet technology and the social structure of communities online. The memo establishes that:
1. Early online television communities formed around shared interests in specific online spaces.
2. The development of social network sites (SNS) helped different social behaviors emerge online because of increased visibility and accessibility of users.
3. While SNS do not represent the only online platforms where television audiences reside and interact, they can be excavated to extract significant, previously unavailable data and trends.
The recent development of Internet-based technologies will influence the future of television audiences, both in how audiences watch television content and how viewers interact with each other. The implications of placing value in social media and SNS are:
1. Evolution of Platforms: The industry must recognize that platforms will evolve and change, and while design will subtly reshape behaviors, social participation should remain constant. The industry must therefore be ready to evolve with the Web and be ready to engage consumers with flexible media experiences that cater to, rather than suppress, these social practices.
2. Recommendation Systems: The availability of widespread social networks, especially integrated with media viewing devices, allows the industry greater opportunities to engage with networks of consumers, rather than simply individuals. Recommendations systems are one area where these networks can be exploited to help deliver content, spread awareness, and reinforce brand identity, while providing the industry better systems to measure consumer engagement online.
3. Global Ecosystem: With more users online than ever before, the industry should push to make its content as widely available as possible. As social networks span global markets, so too should companies embrace global distribution, allow television content to spread across those vast networks, and aim to broadcast simultaneous worldwide releases.
Bio:
Alex Leavitt is a doctoral student in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. His primary research focuses on alternative uses of social media, networked communication, and Internet culture. On the side, he studies digital transnational fandom around Japanese pop culture.
Prior to USC, Alex was a research assistant to danah boyd at Microsoft Research New England. He also researched with the Convergence Culture Consortium, where he wrote "Watching with the World: Television Audiences & Online Social Networks". Additionally, Alex has served as a Lead Researcher on the Web Ecology Project and has worked with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Alex has written frequently for the Futures of Entertainment blog, and he writes long-form about his research at The Department of Alchemy blog. He can be reached via email at alexleavitt@gmail.com and on Twitter @alexleavitt.
"Creating with the Crowd": Catching Up with Queremos' Bruno Natal
At the Futures of Entertainment 5 conference next week on MIT's campus, we'll be featuring a panel entitled "Creating with the Crowd: Crowdsourcing for Funding, Producing and Circulating Media Content." (A few tickets are still available here.), The panel will be moderated by FoE Fellow and Director of Brand Innovation at Almabrands in Chile Ana Domb and will feature academics and media industries innovators from Brazil, Finland, The Netherlands, and the U.S. Recently, Ana had a chance to catch up with one of the panelists, Bruno Natal of Queremos:
Ana: Bruno, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and your interests.
Bruno: I'm going to Futures of Entertainment representing a group of six people. I'm a documentarian and music writer. Tiago Lins is a video photographer with a degree in economy. Pedro Seiler is a cultural promoter. Felipe Continentino is a TV director. Pedro Garcia works in advertising. And Lucas Bori is a still photographer. Besides making films such as Dub Echoes, I have a weekly column at Rio's newspaper O Globo and blog at URBe. I am also one of the founders and editor of the portal OEsquema.
Ana: What are you working on now?
Bruno: Right now, Queremos and its growth has been taking up much of my time, but I still write and blog. This year, I managed to make one doc about Brazilian music legend Chico Buarque's latest recording. It was actually an online project, called "Chico: Bastidores", through which we released many video "pills" before the record came out, with exclusive content to those who pre-bought it, including the documentary. Since the album release, all content is open, so anyone can enjoy it. The idea was to boost the pre-sale and increase the presence of the artist's work in the media (a whole month, instead of just everything coming out on the release date), and it did quite well in both cases.
Ana: What do you think crowdsourcing (as funding, distributing or any other form) contributes to the current media landscape and how do you think it could help shape its futures?
Bruno: I think it means that there are less people in between fans and artists, in a broad sense, and a lot of things can come from that. With less filters, there is also less noise in the communication, so both ends can get their ideas through with much more effect. More importantly, by getting involved in the process from such a early stage, fans also get a better idea of how the industry works, and this can be beneficial on many levels. For instance, in our case, fans now have a much better understanding of the value of a ticket and why it is important to pay for it (Rio has a true "VIP guest list" problem.) in order to keep things happening. Having said that, the main change is probably in transparency. Things are becoming much clearer nowadays, in everything. Also, as we can see by the amount of revolutions going on nowadays, from Iran to #occupywallstreet, people learned they could get together online with some ease. Now, they are using this power to transform society, on all levels. This is just the beginning.
Previewing Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories at FoE5
This year at FoE, I'll be engaging a panel of great speakers to have a slightly different conversation about location, beyond the usual marketing and technology-focused discussions. With mobile and location-based services on the rise, it is increasingly important think about how these technologies, the behaviors they enable, and the data they produce change how we encounter the spaces we inhabit and interact with one another within them.
As a quick introduction, I wanted to share a little background on our panel:
Tell us a little bit about what you're currently working on and why:
Andy Ellwood: I am currently heading up the business development efforts for Gowalla. We are working with brands and partners around the world as it pertains to the interactions and engagements that our millions of users are creating as it pertains to the stories that they tell about the places that they go.
Dan Street: Hi. I'm CEO of Loku. We bring Big Data tools to Local. You can think of us as a search engine that's specific to local information.
Germain Halegoua: I'm currently working on a few different projects, all related to location or physical place in some way. I'm finishing up a research project about the relationships between vendors and customers over location-based services as well as other social media platforms. I'm beginning to interview people about how they use Google Street View for purposes other than navigation and to examine the participatory cultures that are being formed around StreetView. Mary Gray, Alex Leavitt, and I are working on a project about Foursquare "jumpers" (people who check-in to locations when they're not physically in that location). I'm also working on a collaborative mapping and digital storytelling project that involves bike accidents reported to the Madison, WI Police Department between 2008-2011.
I think it's important to understand what people actually do with navigation and location-
based technologies and the cultures that surround these activities. Frequently, actual
practices tend to differ from intended use, and I think it's important to notice when
and why this happens. All of my current projects deal with social power in some way
(juxtaposing official and vernacular knowledge and experience of place; engaging with
location-based technologies in alternative or oppositional ways; trying to exert control
of customer-vendor relations through location-based technologies) which is a concept
that is under-examined in location-based social media but something that is incredibly
important to understand as more people engage with these systems.
Tell us a little bit about your background and the perspective it brings to your interests:
Andy Ellwood: My background is in sales, most recently selling private jets before jumping into the digital world.
Dan Street: My background is strategy consulting and private equity, in technology and media companies.
Germain Halegoua: My interest in social media and location-based technologies actually stems from studying and participating in documentary film, public access television, and media
activism in NYC. Working on these projects, I observed the ways in which people
harnessed and produced media in order to understand and augment their connection
to local issues, mobilize their neighborhoods, explore their city, and express their social
position within urban space. People have been using technologies to represent and play
with location, and using location to contextualize their experiences, for some time now.
I see activities like "check-ins" and location announcement as an extension of these
mediated practices. Because of my past experiences, I think I'm more apt to think about
a "check-in" as more than "just a check-in," and a lot of my research is driven by the
desire to find out what that means.
How did you first become involved and interested in creating/researching location-based data/interaction/technology? Was there a particular aspect or incident that drew you?
Andy Ellwood: My attraction to tech and digital specifically focused on the ability to take online experiences live and deepen relationships with friends and trusted brands.
Dan Street: I jumped into local both because I care - I'm from a small town, and want to bring some of those dynamics to an urban world - and also because it's a largely untapped opportunity.
Germain Halegoua: I think it might have been when I bought my first cell phone. It was just a bare-bones cell phone with no SMS plan at first (and definitely no apps or web browsing, etc), but it got me thinking about communication, information, and location in a totally different way.
Kill Screen's Jamin Warren on the Futures of Gaming
At the Futures of Entertainment, we've always been big proponents of gaming and gamers. I was thrilled to be able to interview Jamin Warren, Founder of gaming magazine Kill Screen. Kill Screen has some of the best game writing out there, and they're constantly proving the importance of games as a cultural form. Jamin Warren told me about why he founded Kill Screen, where Kill Screen's going next and the (lack of) interactions between gamemakers and fans.
Sheila Murphy Seles: Can you tell me a little about your background and why you founded Kill Screen?
Jamin Warren: I started as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering arts and entertainment there. I wanted to have my own niche, and besides reading, videogames were the only other thing I had done my entire life. But when I started writing about games, I quickly discovered two things. First, large media institutions like the Journal were not interested in games for either their commercial or cultural import. Second, the type of content for gamers was geared at teens and college-student. As someone in my 20s, there was little for me to express the type of game culture that fit into my life as someone interested, not just in games, but the intersections between play and art/design/music etc.
Other popular movements have had a gatekeeper that ushered them into maturity. Rock had Rolling Stone and then MTV. The Internet had Wired. Indie rock had Pitchfork and VICE had hipsters. That was the impetus for Kill Screen -- to embody this new, older videogame player. Gamers have grown-up, but their culture hasn't.
SMS: What are your biggest initiatives currently at Kill Screen?
JW: Currently, our biggest project is the production arm. My partner Tavit came from Atari and the Primary Wave the music publisher. Brands and agencies are looking for better interactive, game projects, but they don't necessarily have the know-how or experience building those. We know games so we can both build and guide them to create better branded experiences. This summer, for example, we built a project from scratch for Sony Music for Incubus to reinvigorate their fan-base. The game saw tremendous engagement (more than 6 min. of avg. playtime) and sparked a conversation.
On the cultural side, there's a big gap for indie gamemakers in terms of their economic ecosystem. If you're an independent photographer, filmmaker etc., you balance your creative work with your commercial obligations. Game designers have no such system as the games industry writ large is organized like Hollywood before the landmark Supreme Court case against Paramount. Gamemakers either have to work for traditional publishers or hope for their indie project to score a hit. By connecting agencies and brands with game designers, we're expanding their ecosystem to allow them to have a project-based system akin to the one enjoyed by other creatives.
SMS: What kinds of collaboration do you see in the game industry between fans/gamers and content creators?
JW: Traditionally, the videogame industry has done a poor job of engaging fans on their own terms. Nintendo is great example of this failure -- the Wii, for example, made it nearly impossible to connect with others online. Facebook integration on XBox Live and PlayStation Network is woeful. Those lack of dialogic tools is emblematic of a larger rift between those who play games and those who make.
One odd example is FarmVille, which perhaps represents an extreme. They A/B test every user experience and that game is in fact a perfect reflection of the desires of the community. This, of course, sucks the fun out, but it is a conversation they are actively having with their community.
I'm most interested in the user tools that are emerging to make it easier to make games. Microsoft's Kodu is designed for kids and Scratch is another "easy" programming language for game devs. There will be a day where game creation tools will be as commonplace as word processing software.
Previewing The Futures of Music at FoE5
Futures of Entertainment Fellow Nancy Baym will be moderating a panel on "The Futures of Music" at our Futures of Entertainment 5 conference Nov. 11-12. Nancy recently had a chance to talk with her five panelists about their background, their current projects, and what they hope to discuss at the conference in two weeks.
First, a brief introduction to Nancy.
Nancy Baym: I'm a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. I study relationships and the internet and, in the last few years, have been working in the area of music. I did one project about Swedish independent music, looking at how fans spread the music online and how labels and musicians embrace file sharing and audience creativity as a means of fostering community and expanding their audience. Recently I've been interviewing musicians (including Erin McKeown, one of our panelists) about their perspective on their audiences and the roles of social media in those relationships. My website is here.
Q: Can you tell our readers a bit about who you are?
Erin McKeown: Howdy readers! I'm Erin McKeown: a writer, musician and producer. For over a decade, I have made albums and toured, both independantly and with labels. I also do some activist thinking about the music business and larger political issues.
Brian Whitman: I'm the co-founder and CTO of the Echo Nest, a music intelligence company I started in 2005 after my dissertation work at MIT at the Media Lab doing "machine listening" -- teaching computers to understand music. We now power almost every music service out there, from MOG to MTV to Clear Channel to hundreds of independent music apps. I have an academic background in natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval, and was a relatively active electronic musician before packing it in to start the Echo Nest.
João Brasil: My name is João Brasil, and I'm a musician, music producer and DJ. I'm a Berklee grad. I produce Brazilian Guetto Tech music (Baile Funk, Tecnobrega and Electronic Forró) and Mashups (Sound Collages). My main music source is the internet. In 2010, I made a project where I made one mashup per day.
Chuck Fromm: I'm a catalytic networker helping people to connect, collaborate, create and circulate resources, primarily around Christian religious organizations. I work extensively with church leaders, music industry and independent producers and executives, artists, scholars and writers. I am an adjunct professor in the academy in communications and publisher of Worship Leader Magazine, which allows for connection between writers, leaders and communicators.
Mike King: I'm an instructor at Berkleemusic.com, the online extension school for Berklee College of Music. I've been teaching here for close to five years, and I've written three courses that are music business and music marketing-focused. I'm also the director of marketing for Berkleemusic. I currently teach one course at Northeastern University on music marketing and promotion, and wrote a book called Music Marketing: Press, Promotion, Distribution, and Retail in 2009. Prior to working at Berklee, I was a product manager at Rykodisc, which at the time was a large independent record label in Salem, MA. I was the managing editor of the Herb Alpert Foundation-funded online musician's resource www.artistshousemusic.org for three years.
Q: What have you been working on lately?
Erin McKeown: I've got two albums cooking: my latest singer-songwriter effort, done in the spring. and a record of anti-xmas carols, out just a few days before the conference. This year, i am also a fellow at the Berkman Center, where I have a number of projects simmering around artist revenue streams and policy.
Brian Whitman: Besides the everyday drama and excitement of being the co-founder and CTO of a 35-person startup, I've been focused on two core Echo Nest technologies: our audio fingerprinting and music resolving systems and our "taste profiles" -- recommendation and playlist generation at the listener level. Both involve taking our massive database of music (the biggest in the world, we are pretty sure) and figuring out ways in which we can make people's experience with music better. I have a lot of misplaced bitterness towards the way the tech industry has handled music technology and the music experience for musicians and listeners. I think they've not given it the care that it deserves, and I'm hoping to fix that.
João Brasil: I'm working on my new album for Man Recordings (German Label). I just finished the soundtrack for the Copacabana Beach NYE fireworks. I was invited to be the Brazilian representative DJ for the J&B Whisky Start a Party project, and I'm producing the track for the Nike Run 600 Km project Brazil.
Chuck Fromm: I'm in an intense learning environment as to how media spreads. A small story about a Bible study at my house and local city government spread from local, to national and international in less than two weeks, and so I've been personally experiencing the power of broadcast and social media firsthand.
Mike King: Lately, I've been working on my second book for Berklee Press, which will be focused on online music marketing and the direct to fan approach to marketing. I've also been working on raising a new son, Sam, who is three months old.
Q: What do you hope to talk about in this panel?
Erin McKeown: The time that starts just after today: the Future. Just kidding. We have existing compensation structures that have quite a few flaws. How can artists maximize a broken system? In the bigger picture, how can music benefit from, say, the lessons of the local food movement? Or even #occupywallst?
Brian Whitman: I get a lot of musicians approaching me after talks asking how they can do better in this new world where most everything is available for free -- one way or another -- and there are millions of artists all fighting for the same overworked listeners' attention. I'd like to discuss the importance of data to musicians and how it affects them, even if they've never thought about it.
João Brasil: I hope to talk about internet X music, mashup culture, Worldmusic 2.0, Tecnobrega revolutionary music business in Pará, Youtube X MTV.
Chuck Fromm:
- How any pig can fly in a hurricane; I've flown in several of them.
- The development and promotion of early Christian hymns composed in the 2nd and 3rd century, remediating and circulating via networked communications.
- Working in and with new folk culture created by Internet communications.
- Key trends that are emerging in the promotion, creation and distribution of music over the past 5 years, based on my own work in music and entertainment as a participant/observer.
Mike King: I'd like our panel to be a discussion on how the music industry is continuing its massive shift - both the positives and negatives - for consumers and artists. I'd like to cover streaming music, social media, direct to fan options, and revenue options for artists.
Collaboration across Borders: Interview with Seung Bak of DramaFever
Founded in 2009, DramaFever, an English language video site for Asian TV shows is now the largest US-based site of its kind, boasting over a million active users every month. I had the chance to interview Seung Bak, one of the founders of DramaFever about why the site has become so successful. He also told me about some of the collaborations DramaFever has been able to foster between American fans and producers of Asian dramas.
