Posted by: RFM on: July 10, 2009
You may remember our discussion some time ago about the kind of snotty remark a TV executive might make with regard to our new media habits: where do people find the time? The answer was always to do with the choices people make about what to do with their “cognitive surplus” or “free time” (!). In short, if you spend an hour a day playing Doom, you spend one less hour per day watching Corrie. Or something.
Some hard data is starting to appear, which makes it clear that once people spend £800-900 on an iPhone+contract, they spend a lot of time touchy-feeling it and playing with their apps. Apps = entertainment, and (yet) another use for that cognitive surplus.
You can read about it on All Things Digital, where there’s a helpful infographic. Although we can be sceptical about some of these numbers, what they show is that – as the article says – people are beginning to think more about their apps and less about their TVs, newspapers, and books. Or even their old desktop or laptop computer. The iPhone, remember, is more powerful than a 1999 laptop computer.
So if you’re in the media business, the implications here are clear — shoving your stuff in a browser won’t do you much good in a mobile world defined by apps. And the smarter media executives I know are scrambling to keep adapt.
Posted by: RFM on: July 8, 2009
Sadly, the Independent seems to have been the only UK newspaper with the balls to tell the truth about the King of Child Molesters Pop in this article by John Niven, which I mentioned in class the other day. this short piece in Vanity Fair provides links to a series of articles written by Maureen Orth, in which she investigates the accusations made against Jackson over a decade.
Worth reading to provide balance to the hagiography being perpetrated by the rest of the mainstream media. For those of you still in denial, there was no legal challenge to anything written in Vanity Fair.
Posted by: RFM on: July 6, 2009
Today in class we discussed one of the most fundamental questions linked to the impact of new media: how has new media affected the newspaper industry, and can it – or will it – survive that impact?
Some historical background is useful here.
The last time that newspapers were in the business of news – that is, breaking news about events – was before the General Strike of 1926. Before then, when radio was in its infancy, the BBC wasn’t allowed to produce its own bulletins. News was broadcast only in the evening, with the bulletins written for the BBC by the newspapers.
During the General Strike, however, the BBC stepped in to report the news, and got a taste for doing things its own way. Since then, more or less, people have turned to broadcast media for news about events. It’s what radio does well, whether it’s reporting from the front line in World War 2, or just broadcasting crucial speeches and press conferences. We may get tweets and texts now, but the radio is still very often the most accessible medium – at home, at work, or in the car.
Today, we asked in class, what is it that newspapers do well? We came up with the following:
The next question was this: apart from when radio took away the newspapers’ ability to report on “breaking” news, how has new media affected the newspapers’ ability to do what they traditionally do so well?
The real answer – which the newspapers should have realised, instead of hitting the PANIC button – is that new media does nothing to affect the newspapers’ traditional role. On the other hand, they have panicked.
What might they do to survive?
In my opinion, pay walls are a dead end. As previously noted, it takes just one person to “reveal” what’s behind the curtain on a blog or a rival news site (it’s quite legitimate to report what others are reporting) and your pay wall is blown.
Any attempt to offer a “richer” experience with a paid-for PDF is also doomed, because people are willing to accept any amount of lost quality if something is free.
My own solution would be to stop giving away their content online – altogether. Instead of putting almost the entire print edition online, they could publish a daily update of “what’s in today’s paper” and “what’s in tomorrow’s paper” – perhaps a running blog of story conferences and editorial decision-making, along with the usual wire-service stories – and then make you pay for a rich print edition with all the content you otherwise would not get.
Forget trying to compete with the BBC and Twitter on breaking news. Do what you do well – what you always did well – and do it in print.
Posted by: RFM on: July 6, 2009
The Guardian has an article today about the possibility of US online catchup service Hulu arriving in the UK. Hulu aggregates content from NBC, ABC and Fox, but in entering the UK market would need to negotiate through the minefield of various broadcast rights.
One of the ironies of their precious copyright laws, and their silly habit of dividing the world up into different territories (even though, clearly, the internet is border-agnostic), is that they’ve created themselves a ridiculously tangled web of who-owns-what and who-has-the-right to broadcast which show at which time and how often.
It was complicated enough when Five tried to launch Five US, discovering that it didn’t own the repeat rights it thought it did.
The British government have further muddied the waters by refusing to allow the BBC, which we pay for, to co-operate with ITV and Channel 4 in launching a combined on-demand download service. It would have been so convenient for British consumers, of course, but too convenient apparently.
Capitalism demands that things get extra-complex (and thus more expensive and wasteful).
Project Kangaroo Stymied commercial broadband catchup service involving BBC Worldwide, ITV, C4. Named to symbolise a great digital leap forward.
Project Canvas Next-generation Freeview box to allow broadband catchup services on TV sets. Blank canvas on which to build.
Project Marquee BBC offer to share iPlayer technology. Internal working name for what is hoped will be a big tent of broadcasters.
Hulu US ad-funded broadband catchup service. Means “a gourd” in Mandarin, and the firm says it has meant “a holder of precious things”.
Posted by: RFM on: July 3, 2009
Now the BBC has cancelled Robin Hood, the only surviving Saturday night escapist fantasy dramas are Doctor Who and Merlin. Robin Hood got under 2 million viewers for its last episode. Amazingly, this is mainly because it was shoved over onto BBC2 so that BBC1 could keep Andy Murray on screen.
Why not put Andy Murray on BBC2? Because received wisdom is that if you encourage people to reach for their remote control, they will notice all the other buttons as well as the one you want them to push. “Sod this for a game of soldiers. I’m not watching that snobs’ channel. What are Ant and Dec up to?”
Since Merlin is (a) rubbish and (b) looks expensive, it’ll be next for the chop, though it may get one more run.
The comment thread on the above-linked story tells the tale: very few defenders of the awful Robin Hood. Why was it so bad?
The simple answer is: contempt for the audience. Because people who work in the media often have contempt for the very people who ultimately pay their wages by watching their shows, it may seem odd to you. But they see shows like Buffy, The X Files, Supernatural and Smallville. and they don’t think, “These are slick shows with great teams of writers, character-driven plots, and pretty decent actors…” Instead, they think, “We could produce crap like this. Those people will watch anything. Let’s hire some cheap writers and unemployed actors who won’t care that the script is terrible.”
So they go off and produce crap, and lo, the prophecy fulfils itself. Doctor Who continues to be a success not because those people will watch anything, but because every now and then there’s an episode like “The Girl in the Fireplace”, “The Empty Child,” or “Blink.”
Sadly, nobody at the BBC (or ITV) seems to realise this.
In related news, Ravi Somaiya in the Guardian asks why summer blockbusters are so dire? Simple answer: contempt for the audience.
Posted by: RFM on: July 2, 2009
It follows that if we've been dumbed down by technology, we may be unable to recognise it. Students copying from Wikipedia think they are smarter than their parents, in the same way drunks think they are able to drive.
Posted by: RFM on: June 30, 2009
Thanks to BoingBoing for bringing this to my attention. These guys have created a comic strip based on Lord of the Rings, as if played by a bunch of ignoramus Dungeons and Dragons players. Very, very funny.
Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign
Posted by: RFM on: June 29, 2009
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson.
When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number.
Via Daring Fireball
It should be noted that Chris Anderson’s book Free, has an RRP of £18.99, though a free e-book version will be available in the week of publication.
Posted by: RFM on: June 29, 2009
Further to our look at the video response on YouTube, there’s some interesting hard data around now about the kind of people who contribute to online outlets like Wikipedia and YouTube and what motivates them. Via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog, I found this New Scientist report about an article in the journal Cyber Psychology and Behaviour: Personality Characteristics of Wikipedia Members (links to a PDF of the original article).
The conclusion seems to be that Wikipedia contributors tend to be introverted and motivated not by altruism but by – perhaps – a need to put everybody straight. This may not be much of a surprise to those of us who don’t feel moved to contribute to Wikipedia, but think about the implications: how many of you use Wikipedia for research, and how far is your knowledge about the world and its ways skewed by the point of view of grumpy and “disagreeable” people. By “disagreeable” I think we mean the kind of people who tend to disagree with others – a lot. From the article:
It may be that the prosocial behavior apparent in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives, such as personal expression, raising self-confidence, and group identification, motives
which are not associated with high levels of agreeableness. Another interesting result was the significant difference found between Wikipedia members and non-Wikipedia members in the openness trait. Again, this may reflect the fact that contributing to Wikpedia serves mainly egocentric motives.
All of this tallies with another piece of academic research – sponsored by HP – on what motivates people to upload videos to YouTube and the like. It’s not about “sharing”, although that word is bandied around a lot by the web sites concerned: “Share This” etc. It’s about (big surprise) attention-seeking. And if the attention is not found, people tend to abandon the service.
I found a similar thing on Flickr. Once I weaned myself off the need to generate “views” of my photostream by leaving comments on the photos of others, I started to use Flickr as a place to back up and store my best photos, should I have a computer failure, fire, what have you. And nobody cares. Very few people bother you if all you want to do is create a backup set of your iPhoto albums. Once you yourself stop responding to the people who post bland comments like, “Great shot,” the number of people viewing your photos drops through the floor.
The comment section on blogs, then, can be seen less about “conversation and “debate” and more to do with affirmation of your effort. The payment for your labour is attention. Which is about right. Online advertising is sold by means of the concept of the “eyeballs” which will see that ad in that location. It’s an attention economy:
[T]here is ample evidence that while the ratio of contributions to downloads is indeed small, the growth in content provision persists at levels that are hard to understand if analyzed from a public goods point of view. One possible explanation for this puzzling behavior, which we explore in this paper, is that those contributing to the digital commons perceive it as a private good, in which payment for their efforts is in the form of the attention that their content gathers in the form of media downloads or news clicked on. As it has been shown, attention is such a valued resource that people are often willing to forsake financial gain to obtain it
You can read the full article here.
Posted by: RFM on: June 29, 2009
The next day he was still dead, but somehow deader than the day before. He was all over the radio and papers. The TV had clips of Thriller on heavy rotation, which seemed a tad inappropriate, what with him playing a decomposing corpse in it. If Bruce Willis died falling from a skyscraper, I doubt they'd illustrate his life story by repeatedly showing that bit from Die Hard where he ties a firehose round his waist and jumps off the building.
