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...

WHAT HAS CHANGED? KEY TRANSFORMERS IN HUMAN AND MEDIA BEHAVIORS

Traditional media brands and networks are playing catch-up with trends that have been in effect as a result of the Internet for several decades now. In particular, four distinct shifts in audience and consumer behavior have resulted from the influence of the Web and each should guide our thinking about media, marketing, content, and new technologies. These are:

1) Interactivity—audience members and consumers are called “users” with good reason in this medium where the expected experience is no longer the “lean-back” one of the television living room, but the “lean-forward” engagement of a user who expects to have a say and the ability to interact and manipulate his “personal” media environment

2) Personalization—from MySpace to the iPhone, digital media is now super-charged with the capability of incorporating the individual and personal—from branding and iconography to collaborative filtering, choice, and having options are the way of the digital world

3) Immediacy—the web offers the kind of instant gratification that can be addictive from enhanced shopping experiences a la Amazon’s “one-click” buy button to the streaming media of sites like Netflix.com and Hulu.com

4) Community—arguably the most compelling transformation wrought by the Web, the specialization of human experience is now capable of being channeled into affinities of every special interest imaginable where, through the power of networking, like-minded individuals can find each other by just a click-through in a search window

This last transformation is critical because of the way that community has now extended to social media and thereby, changed the very nature of what networks can produce virally. The advent of distributed computing over ten years ago is a tribute to the accelerated power of the networked individual. As part of its value proposition, any new network would have to offer the capability of accommodating and encouraging user generated content and feedback.

Additionally, the community aspect of building network presence should not be restricted to creating Facebook and MySpace pages—several cable networks, for example, have made investments in acquiring several online newsletters to aggregate communities of special interest in the arts, music, and culture, and to create cross-promotional programming opportunities for web content to be broadcast on television and vice versa.

The introduction of time shifting behavior through the use of PVRs and TIVO as well as VOD are all reflections of personalization and the ability of the user to interact with media on demand.

All of the above transformations caused a sea change shift in the nature of media distribution. From peer-to-peer and social network sharing to crowdsourcing and user generated content, the inmates are now running the asylum and distribution that was once in the hands of media companies is now being given a run for the money by game-changing “user distributors”. The trend toward distributed authority of the flat organizational model where decision-making authority is at the edge is just one corporate reaction to this new empowerment of the individual and what Malcolm Gladwell calls “outliers.” Even savvy brands like Amazon have been caught up in the grassfire of a negative blogging campaign, hence, the evolution of the corporate blog as pre-emptive brand strategy.

While conventional wisdom proclaims that the dominant forces that will transform media will come from the introduction of new technologies and changes in the means of distribution, the most powerful transformative agent of change will be a coming generational shift. First signs of such a shift were evident in the advent of multi-tasking and new television formats such as MTV’s experiments with three ten-minute segments making up a half-hour show as well as Nickelodeon’s innovating a programming wheel of five cartoons within a half-hour block of a single show. The shift from the large plasma and HD screen digital surround sound of the home movie theater to the small screen and mp3 of the web and mobile phone are another sign of differing generational appetites in the consumption of media.

The power of web video is also a reflection of how different generations are utilizing media. Six billion videos were viewed on YouTube in January, 2009. Twenty hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Between 150,000 and 200,000 videos are uploaded daily. The growth of short-form video viewing answers a seemingly insatiable appetite among younger audiences for entertainment. The challenge facing traditional long-form and series is that the new viewer is a non-sequential consumer who is apparently less interested in these kind of formats than in instant gratification of what’s hot right now and it does not have to be scripted, professionally produced “broadcast quality”.

There is also a short-form video revolution going on. The single-most influential trend influencing the creation of content is the evolving short-form program format. If YouTube is any indicator, the audience of the future will prefer short attention span theater to the half-hour and hour formats that still dominate traditional broadcast. The average YouTube video is two-minutes and forty-six seconds in duration.

The growth of Twitter should be seen as another indicator for the coming power of snack size media. 70% of its current users joined in 2009 demonstrating a 1400% growth between February, 2008 and February, 2009. An average of twenty million tweets are sent every day with 3.8 billion sent to date.

Short-form program formats are not new and have been around since the 1970’s and 80’s when program insert series such as “This Day in Sports” and “Today in Music History” were successful informational commercials of sixty-seconds in length. But, these formats are a very distant cousin to webisodes and mobisodes that last only several minutes. ABC’s first online experiment in offering its primetime hours for download offers another illustration of how the offline and online worlds differ. As measured by Nielsen, there were some forty million downloads of which the average time viewed was two-minutes. Clearly, the remote control’s cousin is the click of a mouse away.

Social media can now be leveraged to reach target audiences in their native, online environments. The power of online video syndication is that it can reach beyond video networks such as YouTube and Facebook, and engage users through tactics such as community and blogger outreach, featured video portal placement, content seeding, social applications, game development, and other methods. The potential reach of video syndication networks like dailymotion.com, metacafe.com, vimeo.com is expansive.

Certain applications now offer the capability of identifying influencer activity on the Web. Usually, web site and blogs are ranked by popularity. Increasingly, tools like those provided by Buzzlogic and Visible Technologies offer the ability to actually reverse engineer networks of specialized interest. By identifying such nodes of audience concentration that appeal to a particular media brand’s core value proposition and program content, it would be possible to reverse engineer an online component to a vertically integrated network.

Mobile is the fastest growing channel in the world, offering new and exciting opportunities for marketing, advertising and content distribution. Mobile provides a conduit between media outlets, entertainment, e-commerce, and consumers. Mobile data capable phones reached a social tipping point with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

The market for mobile video content is growing at a rate of 20% a month. While they were only introduced a year ago, video ringtones and video screensavers account for approximately 10,000 downloads a month at a price point between $2.50 and $4 (on Tier 1 North American Carriers). Given consumer adoption rates for mobile data and the fact that the music download market still accounts for five million downloads per month (between $2-3), all next generation of handsets will support this type of content and will drive the expansion of this market. As such, the media network of the future will be well advised to create a mobile beach-head to take advantage of the platform for distribution of its content.

What kind of world is this transformative media environment creating? I have written before in this blog ("Is Personalization Really That Personal?", "National Nano Memory", "It's A Short Form World After All", "Why The Web Is Like A Time Machine") about the fact that there is no free lunch and that the allure of new technologies always carries a price, particularly in what may be lost as the result of supposed advantages in efficiency, ease of use, choice, and other features dangled like shiny carrots by new gadgetry. Automation and its impact on the declining of the Industrial Age workforce is one example of the trade-off in human terms that "better machines" have wrought. If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. Or as the Zen Buddhists would say, "Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise."

Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who coined the term “virtual reality”, has written a new manifesto which is essential reading called “You Are Not A Gadget”, which describes at length the perils invited by our increased love affair and reliance on technology, particularly the Internet and social media. Hardly a neo-Luddite, Lanier is not the kind of voice in the wilderness that one might expect to sound the Cassandra call to action and for conscious use of technology. Maybe that’s what makes his beautifully written argument so compelling. Or as Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs once so poetically put it, “I now pronounce you man and…machine.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, Rudolf Steiner predicted that by the end of the century a non-biological lifeform would develop in parallel through a parasitic relationship with biological life. I think that he was prescient in describing our present day silicon-based lifeforms. Anyone who has sat at a keyboard for hours or been pulled by the strange attractor of the Blackberry keypad or iPhone apps knows that feeling of losing control and all sense of time. We might ask in our spare time in between Facebook and texting, who is actually being served here? Are we the digital canaries in the proverbial silicon coal mine?

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the singularity theory (the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence), remembering that the HAL 9000 onboard computer was incapable of lying in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and that he failed when he became paranoid through cognitive dissonance when his instructions were compromised by conflicting instructions as supplied by the NSC and White House—“people who lie for a living”—according to the script in Arthur C. Clarke’s sequel, "2010: The Year We Make Contact."

Perhaps the singularity is not near as Ray Kurzweil has supposed in his recent tome, but is already here. At least, I think that HAL probably had wisdom beyond his circuits when he said, “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” ...OK, already. I hear you. So, why not get off my soap box and let’s just change the channel and see what else is on—after all, we have over five-hundred channels now on TV at least and we’re just getting started on the Web and mobile…

Special thanks for Liz Gebhardt—http://www.thinkingoutloud.com—for the YouTube and Twitter metrics.