Uneven Distribution.

When Conversations Become Content (part 1)

January 30th, 2008

Thanks to the internet, people are soon going to start abandoning both traditional media and entertainment outlets. These traditional outlets catered to large segments, offered little localisation, almost no personalisation, and few options on how and where we could consume them. More importantly however, is that they were one-way. What we are seeing emerge now is that localised, customised, portable media can be both conversational and entertaining. Which one it is depends entirely on the viewer. As more and more people access more and more channels there will be two significant issues for brands and advertising. Firstly with this broadening of media choice traditional advertising approaches will be diluted, partially because it will be harder to get on to all the relevant channels but also because the messages won’t be relevant enough. Secondly there is the element of community and discussion in these new channels, an area that is full of land mines for pretty much any brand that doesn’t seriously understand the space they are participating in.

The most visible examples currently of this phenomenon are Qik and Seesmic. Qik allows users to stream video live from their mobile phones. The video is displayed on their personal ‘channel’ page, and anyone watching at the time can type comments, which in turn display on the users phone screen while they are videoing. The spontaneousness of this service is amazing, and the applications in both entertainment and journalism could verge on revolutionary. But the important element of this technology is that while it is entertaining, it is conversational. People don’t just watch, they participate.

Seesmic is essentially a video version of Twitter. Users post up short videos of themselves, usually doing nothing more than offering up a quick thought. Like Twitter, Seesmic allows you to follow certain people and reply to their videos. As a result, conversations very quickly develop, not just between two people but between a whole swarm of users. This is essentially flash-conversation with no geographical restrictions. Like Twitter, a brief explanation of the site results in one of two responses, “that’s amazing!”, or “so why would I bother?”. But like twitter, it’s only really upon using the service that you realise how enthralling this collective conversation can be. Add in the element of video and you have a serious competitor to almost anything on TV. Also interesting is that the addition of the video element to the conversation in Seesmic results in far more ‘real’ conversations happening in Seesmic as opposed to Twitter.

This shift will happen simply because of the accessibilty of such services. Fragmentation, understanding the idea of choice on the internet and not being locked into mainstream media one-way conversations are all things that we have seen happen relatively recently, and the accessibilty of these tchnologies should be the final piece. Things like Joost, Hulu & Facebook Groups introduced this idea to mainstream thinking, and it has taken off. The increasing use of mobiles as convergent media devices rather than just phones will also drive this adoption.

It’s not hard to realise how quickly this could all take off once people see how easy it use to use their mobile to post a video asking a question on a site like Seesmic, and immediatly be having a conversation with the whole world. At the same time it’s not hard to see why people will gravitate to these services for entertainment & news. The ease of content filtering means we become our own news and entertainment editors, moving forward with the collective meme. There’s also an element of the 90-9-1 rule, meaning the majority of people will simply be viewers.

We’ve already seen examples of these ’spontaneous entertainment channels’ in things like the Seesmic World Project, where one Seesmic user and his son wanted:

What resulted was a stream of videos from people all over the world, telling everybody else about where they live and what it’s like. Yes, this guy and his son could have just looked up Wikipedia, but the personalisation and engagement of video is what makes this sort of idea really special and watchable.

As for news, we’re already seeing dwindling staff numbers at newspapers, and more and more we see traditional media outlets simply following what’s happening online (in the case of the French press, embarrasingly so). Services like Twitter have already been responsible for breaking reports of earthquakes and for reporting on protests , so combine this thinking with services like Qik and Seesmic, the citizen journalism pioneered by sites like Norg, and flash-forums like Tanglr and it’s easy to see how news media could change immensely in a very short amount of time.

Comments

Cool post Nic. Like you, I’m excited. It’s exciting that entertainment need no longer be a fictional narrative, and we’re rediscovering that real people’s real lives can be entertaining, informative and engaging too.

On the publishing side, documenting the events in your life and what you discover doesn’t only gain you an audience, it also helps you define and refine who you have been, are currently, and are becoming.

Your identity isn’t just who you are now. It’s a vector, or a series of curves perhaps. It starts in the past, charting your passage through the events and ideas you’ve experienced and your reaction to those events and ideas.

That vector passes through the present, and that’s what we see of someone and usually think of identity. But the present is only the thinnest possible cross-section of your identity and in isolation gives only the slightest suggestion of who you really are as you continue on.

I think social messaging and social networking is so fundamentally engaging because it gives us an opportunity to capture key moments of our identity as we move forward in time, leaving a documented history behind us, interwoven with the events, ideas, and people we’ve been introduced to along the way, and leaving evidence of how we’ve been influenced by them.

My prediction: browsing real people’s lives and documenting our own for others to browse will be the new entertainment hit for the 2020s.

Good points Alan. I think the fundamental shift in how people consume and treat media will come at the same point that people become honest and themselves online. For 20 years people have used the internet to ‘be someone else’, and it’s only recently that the realisation that the internet is the ultimate historian has appeared. And this is an amazing personal use for the internet, and one that can be more beneficial than detrimental.

And yes, I suppose the ultimate point we will likely end up at is the ultimate in wikipedia-meets-reality-TV.

Good article Nic. I work for a tech company that build applications for the publishing industry. Our customers are keenly aware of the impact the internet is having on their industry and are looking to vendors like ourselves to help them out of their rut. Take a look at our concept video http://www.atex.com/module.asp?XModuleId=23594. Also, have a read of a @gmwils blog entry http://pseudofish.com/blog/2007/08/13/are-newspapers-really-screwed/

That’s a bold prediction right there in your first sentence. How then do you explain this http://tinyurl.com/3gvfyq ?

[...] today, Alan wrote a piece for his blog (inspired by another blogger’s work), about social media. That we do it (and we follow it) not only for the utility and entertainment, [...]