IT'S STILL ALL ABOUT STORYTELLING

I've noticed at recent YouTube,  2nd, 3rd, and 4th screen panels, and other such confabs that established YouTube stars are often unseasoned in the kind of linear storytelling basics that have driven compelling content starting with Radio and Serials. While YouTube "views" may be a good start, it's also been interesting to note that many of these Internet "storytellers" are targeting traditional media distribution as the eventual outlet for their content and careers. Another motivator is suggested by a surge of content producer backlash to Google's revenue share of its nascent subscription channel partnerships. Now that the inmates are running the digital asylum and capitalizing on self-distribution platforms, many pundits and companies are betting that the web will produce talent for other more traditional media.

But, there is a reason why newcomers to programming like Netflix, XBox, and Amazon TV have all hired former entertainment executives to develop their new series entries. And there is probably a reason that they are defaulting to known stars and producers to deliver them. At the same time, the creative agencies in Hollywood have legions of so-called "twenty-somethings" diligently scouring the web for emergent talent to scoop up for representation. The entertainment business is hard to forecast--despite Google's recent announcement that search results can predict weekend box office. As one studio executive remarked, "Duh..." Still, the average YT video is 2:46 long, so short-form is definitely king in terms of the standard issue web viewer and fifteen-second rich media banners are another indicator.

How much narrative can fit in such a format and does it drive sequential viewing like traditional long form? A generational shift has certainly taken place with access to multiple screen entertainment and hopefully it will yield new storytellers and formats. But, web storytellers should look at securing a foundation in what has made stories relevant on an ongoing basis ever since the tribal fireside, rather than engaging only in producing the latest novelty video. We're hopefully moving now beyond the cat videos that dominated early YouTube successes and the opportunities in a multi-channel distribution universe offer these newcomers novel ways of stepping up to the plate and potentially reaching huge audiences. There are other challenges.

I recall a well attended confab a number of years ago at the home of Buzztone Marketing head, Liz Heller, where a web video producer exuberantly proclaimed that his video had received over fifty-thousand "hits". I resisted the temptation strenuously to ask whether the scenario would have changed, had he asked viewers to pay for the privilege.

Even so, the behavioral shift in attention span has yielded an almost cannibalistic appetite on the part of users to novelty, rather than to what used to be called by network program executives, "appointment viewing". Google's addition of watching metrics, speaks to this trend because it essentially measures whether viewers are sticking with a video all the way through as opposed to merely grazing and moving on to the next recommendation by the engine, itself, or from their friends. Among older viewers, binge viewing has also had an impact in the way that traditional television series are watched. Time Warner invested over $30 million last year in Maker Studios and perhaps it will pay off. It also begs the question: does taking this level of investment mean that Maker is not making any money? Predicting the future in Hollywood--exciting as these expansive platforms and distribution channels are--may be better left for the time being to Las Vegas bookies.

(With props to Bill Sarine from Beachglass Films for input and inspiration for this post)

WHAT IS "SOCIAL"?

A more recent take on Andy Warhol’s famous dictum puts us in a future where we will all have 15 friends. If you Google the word “social”, you get over 2 billion results. But, what is this “social” which we all take for granted and of which we all so readily speak? The word appears in history prior to the year 1387 as sociale borrowed apparently from the Latin via the Middle French. Routed from the Roman mother tongue, it originally meant “united or living with others” and “companion.”

Looking just one step further into the wilderness of word origins, we find its root in the Latin sequi which means “to follow.” So, here in a nutshell is where the Twitter transitive verb, “to follow”, finds its first use. If we search still further, we come upon its link to the Old Icelandic seggr meaning “companion or man” and ultimately, to the mother lode in Sanskrit where, as sakha, it simply means “friend.”

Here, we arrive at root origin of the Facebook transitive verb, “to friend”, closing the loop of a word that we use everyday to describe the expanding communication ripples that bind, link, and otherwise connect us at a click. Or to paraphrase what Terence, the Roman philosopher might tweet, “Nothing social is foreign to me.”

DEATH BY DATA

I just finished listening to the complete symphonies of Franz Josef Hadyn who is widely recognized as “the father of the symphony.” His achievement is incredible if only for its sizeable output—some 107 works in all. The reason I bring it up is not out of any odd feeling of accomplishment though the experience was filled with musical wonders—but because it’s made me think that before digital media came on the scene, it would not have been possible to listen to them all—unless, of course, I was able to sit through the four years of concerts that it took for the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester to record the 37 CD set.

The digital compact disc made available comprehensive box sets of individual artists, composers, and bands in diverse collections that encompass the history of music genres including the arcane as well. It may be kind of daunting to confront an artist’s complete works when they exhibit the scale of a Hadyn, for example. The Internet has also made it possible to expand one’s reach exponentially into the world of the consequential, in addition to burying us in minutiae and trivia. The question becomes—how do we go about discovery and finding meaning in this mirror maze of data?

It’s nothing new to say that we are suffering under the weight of information and the grip of technology. Jaron Lanier’s recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is as good as any in the list of jeremiads warning us about giving up our souls to silicon based-lifeforms. Personally, I experienced a tipping point this past summer with my inbox groaning for the mercy of the delete button and unsubscribe links which became my truest online friends.

The data available at a mere mouse click through search is imposing as well. Recently, my ten-year-old son expressed an interest in movies about World War II. He came to me frustrated by the wide range of choices offered by Netflix. It became apparent to me that his desire for discovery needed human intercession—and not the kind offered by several engines that pride themselves on non-robotic crawler solutions and even so-called "human search." Collaborative filtering and recommendation engines be damned, what he was asking for was curation.

The future of search is curation. I am convinced it will be at the foundation of many successful business enterprises and for individuals who can provide an editorial perspective on qualifying information. It’s not enough just to make the information available as we have been finding out. Say you were new to rock and roll—or Hadyn, for that matter. Where would you start? Google? Wikipedia? iTunes? And if so, how reliable are these methods? Google’s acquisition of metaweb last July speaks to emergent search methodologies that attempt to provide a layer of contextualization. Wolfram/Alpha is another that steps up the visual component of search.

In a conversation with Frank Zappa, he once pointed out to me that the binary mind behind modern computer technology is more limited than we think, particularly when taking into consideration the nature of time. He saw the conventional perspective of past, present, and future augmented by “never” and “eternity” and offered a vision of time as spherical and non-linear. He suggested that a computer that added these two features to the conventions of "on" and "off" switching would yield results that were more in keeping with the way that we live in time radially with our brains. Before he died in 1993, Frank joked that the Japanese “had probably already been working on it.”

The religious scholar, Mircea Eliade, once pointed out that the end of an era or great age often generates a popular belief that if all information were to be made available, that the Answer will then present itself. Of course, if Google were a religion, this idea would be the central tenet of the digital faith—and any entity whose corporate philosophy is “You can make money without doing evil” might arouse suspicions. Its mega initiatives like Google Earth and Project Gutenberg should raise an eyebrow at least. Who knows, maybe Google has already discovered the Answer to the Answer.

But, on the whole, I prefer to look for the answer in music, say in one of Bach’s inventions or in a John Coltrane solo, than in any old text-based search. It is here that we are presented with the age-old battle of what came first at the Creation—a subject of one of Hadyn’s master works as well—did the universe start with light as in a very special visual effect or was it in born of sound, mantra or "the Word"? I’ll place my bet on the sound of music any day because a Google search I just did yields 146,000,000 results for “Let there be light” versus a search for “The Big Note" which wins with 203,000,000--so it must be true...

WHY THE WEB IS A TIME MACHINE

Have you ever noticed how your sense of time is affected when you are online? I remember when I first started exploring the Internet (in a bygone era when such activity was somewhat cutely described as “surfing the web”) and being interrupted by my wife at around 3 in the morning when she asked, “Do you know what time it is?”

I’d been online since early that evening and to tell the truth, I actually had absolutely no idea what time it was—or the hidden subtext buried in her question. When I contemplate how the Web has changed since then, one of the things that stands out is that the novelty of finding the new may have dissipated, but there is still a sense of being in a different time zone when online. Today, the so-called “three-second rule” which seems to rule a lot of web marketing and behavior dictates that a site’s “call to action” or “value proposition” must be readily placed in the upper right quadrant of the screen in order to capture the nano attention span of the current day web user.

So, in the 15 years or so since the first web browser, Mosaic, we seem to have narrowed our field of vision with an increased demand for instant gratification—the YouTube cannibalistic effect to see new video after new video as a contrast to appointment and series viewing habits that once dominated broadcast television—and now, out of the 11.8 billion web sites and blogs (as of 2005) to choose from, it’s given new meaning to the next channel is “just a click of the remote away”.

In this case, the next site is just a mouse click away and seems to be the result of a generational change as much as one directed by so much choice. This seeming infinite sprawl of sites called for an organizing principle much like a contemporary Alexandrian Library—just with all of its index cards thrown chaotically into virtual space—hence, the search engine appeared on the scene and now Google famously or infamously owns much of that universe.

Still, the one thing that infinity seems to belie is that we have a lot of time on our hands. I joke with some of my friends that they must have full-time staffs to manage their social media accounts. And Twitter is the most recent example of breaking down time into the nano. It appears that just like some virtual Alice, we are getting both smaller and longer in time through the Web. I still often forget how long I’ve been online—even if the time I spend “surfing” has been replaced by more targeted use. And when I think about where the time is going when I am online, I am often reminded of something that the Austrian Spiritual Scientist, Rudolf Steiner once said at the beginning of the 20th century.

In one of his more obscure papers, he predicted that by the end of the century, a new life-form would appear that was both non-biological and would grow in parallel with biological life-forms by using their energy to propagate itself. What if that’s where all the time is going? Sounds kind of creepy, but the reality is that the silicon-based life-forms have already arrived and may be thriving quite well on our backs.

In his 2007 book, New Theories of Everything, English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician, John D. Barrow , writes: “Today, a science fiction writer looking for a futuristic tale of silicon dominance would not pick upon the chemistry of silicon so much as the physics of silicon for his prognostications. But this form of silicon life could not have evolved spontaneously: it requires a carbon-based life-form to act as a catalyst. We are the catalyst. A future world of computer circuits, getting smaller and smaller yet faster and faster, is a plausible future “life-form”, more technically competent than our own.”

Barrow’s last statement certainly gives pause. First, it certainly gives new meaning to the notion that the Singularity is Here (see Ray Kurzweil's book and also . Additionally, any advanced extraterrestrial tourists cruising in our galactic neck of the woods and seeing just how little we have evolved since the Upper Paleolithic with wars and climate change ruling the day—not millennia—would give this small planet an “F” on its cosmic report card. So, perhaps it’s not a big stretch that machines can evolve as a “more technically competent” species than us. And maybe we should be more conscious where the time goes when we are in the virtual pipeline looking for that perfect, next breaker.

My son has a Time Machine book that came with a delightful pocket watch whose hands and numbers run backwards. I’m still trying to figure out how to wind it. But, it’s led me to ponder that it would be interesting if human life had its own version of a web “history” or back button that worked as well as it does for the new breed of silicon-based life-forms. If they should eventually ask us to join them, perhaps this would be a deciding factor in their favor. As Jorge Luis Borges once noted, “The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.” Maybe the best that our partnership with technology can do is to point us in time in the direction of the gaps as we surf between the waves of web pages and electricity. Or as Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs once said, “I now pronounce you Man and Machine.”