Parting shots on how media is changing…
…before I take the rest of the year off from blogging… especially since seem to have already stopped blogging back in November– oy!
So much is going on and I’ve been traveling so much that I’m going to put my lack-of-blogging guilt on hold until the start of January. So, before I exit stage left, some questions that I’ll be pondering while I’m away and hope to dive into after the first of the year:
In music, when does a cover become a standard? I’m obsessed with artists covering the famous songs of other artists (see my post on “Rainbow Connection” from a few months back for a bit more on this), but at some point the dialog between different versions fades away and what is left is a standard. This is the difference between Elvis singing The Beatles’ “Yesterday” onstage in Hawaii and anybody singing “Happy Birthday to You.” When does that transition between cover and standard start?
Why do we digital folk believe so intensely in the wisdom of crowds? Historically speaking, mob rule has rarely worked out well, so why do we as a new media culture accept prima facie that groups of people are smarter? Perhaps I just need to drill down more into this work, but I worry that we’re not making enough of a distinction among different kinds of groups.
How long until somebody makes it easy to cross the last 10 feet between the computer and the television? It’s the killer app that I’ve been waiting for. Last night, I watched an episode of (guilty pleasure alert) “October Road” on ABC.com and enjoyed it, but I would have enjoyed it MORE on my couch watching it on the big screen. Why can’t somebody do this for me? (See the first chapter of Henry Jenkins “Convergence Culture” for a longer and more articulate version of this whine.) In the first dotcom bubble (what Community Connect CEO Ben Sun wittily refers to as the “dotpocalypse”) the big question was “the last mile,” but now we’ve whittled this down to 10 feet. For more on this, see an article I wrote for iMedia Connection.
How do we create eventness in media consumption? More and more, the media we watch is masturbatory– consumed alone in a dark room. Simply watching an episode of “30 Rock” with my wife sitting next to me is a better experience by orders of magnitude than sitting by myself and watching the best performance of anything else ever. Her presence enlivens the experience in all sorts of ways (see Daniel Goleman’s recent best seller “Social Intelligence” for some of why this is). How do media people help their audiences to create this sort of experience, and are media people even equipped to think about this in a useful way?
How is it that nobody has called NBCU head Jeff Zucker on his bull***t? In a recent talk, Zucker said of the prices that new media consumption of his programming brings in relative to broadcast dollars, “We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side.” The way he phrased the question speaks volumes: it leaves all the agency on NBCU’s side… as if the media monolith HAS A CHOICE in the matter. Dude, this is SO not up to you. The dollars are going away and the only money that is going to be left on the table can be counted in pennies. The bad news is that a lot of fatcat big media lifestyles are going to change. But maybe in the coming shakeout we’ll see rise of what I’ve been calling “the artistic middle class.” All that being said, I’m a big fan of Hulu, but see the last 10 feet question above.
And with that, I’m off… happy holidays to everybody, and thanks so much for reading Mediavorous.
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