January 17, 2006
Doubleplusgood Big Brother Minipax
speakwriting bellyfeel blackwhite prolefeed plusgood.
My Orwellian nightmare continues. (Little Brother series Part 4. Also see 1, 2 and 3.)
The title of this post, written in Newspeak, translates into Oldspeak as “It is very good that our government’s National Security Administration is illegally wiretapping and recording our citizens’ communications, and I feel deeply and emotionally, without question, that whatever reason our government gives our citizens to justify it is very good.”
Of course, in the Orwellian future, I would have to say such a thing because language has no accommodation for a heretical thought, or a thought diverging from the principles of the government. It would be literally unthinkable, or at least inexpressible in words.
Even if I could say something like “doubleplusUNgood Big Brother Minipax,” it would be crimethought and the thinkpol would surely show up and make me an unperson if I uttered such words anywhere near a telescreen.
Dayorder duckspeak plusgoodest Minitrue.
In the Orwellian future, ubiquitous “telescreens” that were essentially two-way flat-panel TVs ensured no citizen ever escaped the watchful eye of Big Brother. Such a system would make sense at the time Orwell was looking into the future – he had not been able to envision a future where we would conduct our personal interactions not on the street in face-to-face encounters, but via electronic transmission of bits and bytes. The fact that all electronic communication consolidates somewhere (through a mail server, at your ISP, a switch, a google server) means that the present-day version of the telescreen is a reality, it just happens in the form of such patriotic and in-the-best-interest-of-the-people sounding projects as Carnivore.
Do you think a domestic spying program is a positive move to increase the safety of the American People? Do you think it is an utterly reprehensible abuse of power and an encroachment on the personal liberties upon which America was founded?
Before you consider your opinion, think about the concept of surveillance in general and decide whether you have already very happily invited into your life a certain decrease of your personal liberties.
Technology has accelerated us into a reality of connectedness – not just to each other, but to other things. The bi-directional nature of our communication tools has transformed each of us into transponder nodes on a massively connected media network. Some of the nodes on that media network are not people at all, but are valuable media sources that add value to our daily communications by knowing where we are, what we consume, who we know and how we communicate.
Do you want a mobile coupon to make your cell phone vibrate when you walk by a Starbucks? Then the media network will need to know where you are at all times. Do you want your TiVo to automatically record a new show for you? Then it has to compare your viewing habits to that of everyone else like you on the media network and provide you with that valuable service. Do you use LinkedIn for professional networking? The only way that service works effectively to is know the relationships of every user of the system through the media that you provide – in this case, a resume showing everywhere you have ever worked. Do you use mobile IM? It knows the communication presence and habits of everyone who uses it, and necessarily maintains the interrelationships of every user.
You may not think of it this way, but as valuable as the services that I mentioned are to you, they require your complicit surrender of a certain degree of personal privacy. In order for these technological advancements to add value to your life, they literally have to surveil you and your actions. What’s more, your participation is not completely passive – you have to provide a certain amount of information to participate in these surveillance-based services, and without the collective participation of every user, the services cease to provide any value.
So what is the worst-case scenario of massively distributed participation-based surveillance? A Starbuckian society where barely-human automatons happily line up, often out the door, to receive a third daily injection of caffeine because they got a half-off coupon to do so, not because they opted in, but because Starbucks tracked their purchasing behavior through their Starbucks debit card? How about TiVo replacing programming executives (and indeed, the very notion of scheduled viewing) based on proprietary volumetrics provided collectively by every TiVo owner, not because they affirmatively opted in to having their viewing habits used as such, but because the implicit value of the service requires it? What if you get introduced to a hot business opportunity based on a tenuous professional relationship with someone who knows someone who knows someone who wants to meet you, not because you were looking for such a relationship, but because you were simply findable? (Just happened to me today, in fact.) What if AOL serves you locally relevant, time-sensitive ads to your mobile AIM client whenever you get handed off to a new cell tower, not because you asked them to do so, but because it is the price you pay for a free version of the service and the ads are so targeted and relevant that you actually appreciate it? What if an NSA agent shows up at your door to inquire about the curious string of emails you sent to your distribution list which includes various representatives of the Carlyle Group, known members of a terrorist sleeper cell and a couple of friends of yours who work at the San Onofre nuclear power plant, not because you opted in to be surveilled, but because such an active surveillance system is designed to extract relevance from extraordinary patterns for some (real or imagined) benefit?
Where do you draw the line at intrusive? All of these scenarios require some level of active surveillance, and some level of participation on your part. That participation is via the media you create, whether it is in the form of an email, a profile, (created or derived) activity log or location.
And so we are entering an Era of Surveillance, where every person is an active node on a massive media network, and personal feelings and politics aside, it is impossible to discuss the future of media without considering its impact on personal liberties. The ACLU has published an interesting report on the subject.
If the future of media is two-way, and it is created at the edge of the network and distribution is via a series of overlapping personal networks within a geographically relevant media networking grid, the interface to which is a portable location-aware Personal Media Device, (PMD) then the very far-reaching implications of a new media future extend much farther beyond the evolution of, say, your television viewing experience.
Media, communication and surveillance are colliding into one new form. Gone is the notion of media passivity, sitting on your couch and letting the cable television wash over you. Don’t bother trying to make that experience any better. Media is active, facilitating connectedness. There are more people sending an SMS at this moment than there are watching digital cable.
Tune in, Turn on, Get laid
When Timothy Leary coined his counterculture phrase “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” he was advocating that young people initiate cultural change by ingesting psychedelic drugs and voluntarily removing themselves from society.
The difference between then and now is that through technology kids literally live in a different world from adults and so there is no reason to even recognize the prevailing culture as something to which one must be counter. The “dropping out” part makes no sense to a generation that recognizes the benefit of increasing one’s social capital by simply being findable and available to the largest possible number of potential connections.
The recently coined phrase “MySpace Generation” is a nice way of saying that from this generation forward, people simply won’t care about being surveilled, because the word “surveillance” has been replaced by the term “plugged in” and the notion of “logging in” to The Internets has no meaning to a generation that never logs out.
Participative, shared experiences facilitated by electronic tools are the glue that connect this generation, and the stigma of an oppressive Big Brother has dissolved into the benefit of having multiple Little Brothers all watching each other, to the great benefit of everyone watching. Furthermore, there is a direct correlation between your level of participation and the degree to which you are surveilled. And, as unfathomable as it may sound to Timothy Leary’s generation, more is better.
And that is one of the most profound implications of the new media future: To not be a contributor in some form means to not benefit from the media networking collective. Sure, privacy will be available at a cost, but most people will say, “I’d prefer half off my triple grande latte.”
Whether you think a surveillance society is good or bad, I would argue that it cannot exist without the willing participation of the members of society. Maybe you think it is net positive because it provides value in the form of new friends, new music and coupons. Maybe you think it is ultimately net negative because you fear a future where the flow of media is unfairly one-way.
In either case, there is a solution to balance the equation: Empower Little Brother. Put a two-way “telescreen” in the hands of every citizen and see what happens.
If you are a right wingnut conservative and your political orientation is just to the right of Rush Limbaugh and you advocate a decrease in personal liberties in exchange for an insular, secure society and favor a policy of blind and belligerent nationalism, then an increase in domestic spying is a good thing for you, and you should see the value of putting a spying device into the hands of every man, woman and child so that no interloper will ever be able to escape the watchful eye of the good citizens of society. There is anecdotal evidence of ordinary citizens assisting authorities to apprehend alleged criminals in this way.
If you are a bleeding-heart liberal, are registered to vote with no party affiliation because you are disgusted with the political climate in our country, believe that giving up personal freedoms for security makes you neither free nor secure, and think that the government’s domestic spying program is not only wrong, but illegal and an unchecked abuse of power, then a decrease in the efficacy of the government’s spying program through forced transparency is a good thing for you, and you should see the value of putting a spying device into the hands of every man, woman and child in America to spy on the government as a counterbalance measure. There is anecdotal evidence of ordinary citizens assisting in the legal cases of people wrongfully accused by lying NYPD officers who falsified their police reports.
Ah, the fresh smell of the future. To some it smells bad, and to others it’s like roses. To me, it is too early to tell, but one thing is for sure: The order of the day should be the democratization of media and information. Only by doing so can we ensure the good aspects of a participative media future continue to bear fruit and also make sure the potentially worst outcome never sees the light of day – at least not if billions of people can vote with their feet. We have already begun the march toward total personal transparency. The more we empower each individual participant on the mobile media network, the more valuable the network and the greater the benefit to everyone participating. If that information starts to flow too much in one direction, and not to the benefit of its providers, the massive crowd will simply unplug from that grid and find a new route around it to connect with each other.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:46 AM
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July 14, 2005
I Am A Citizen Journalist
A New York City building collapsed this morning, injuring several people
I am in New York this week for several meetings. This morning we were finishing breakfast at a restaurant on the upper west side when we heard sirens and saw fire engines rushing by. A few blocks away, a building had collapsed. Apparently it was being carefully demolished anyway but then lost structural integrity and came crashing down unexpectedly. I was there shortly after it happened and snapped the following pics with my camera phone and posted them to my channel on Rabble. (I also added my reporter-style commentary. If you have Rabble on your phone, just search for “building collapse” or browse the recent posts in the New York area.)
NYPD Canine Team on site to search for buried people
Hundreds of people looking at an empty spot where a building used to be
Police rope off the area around the collapsed building
Of the many opportunities that only LMNOs can capitalize on, my personal favorite is citizen journalism. We built our platform to be the hub powering a suite of applications all based on the same basic construct – that user-generated content and distribution via a series of overlapping personal networks is the future of media. There are literally hundreds of applications that fit this paradigm, but citizen journalism is one of the most important.
Turning Point: London
We will look back at the London Bombings as the turning point at which mainstream media realized the value of user-generated content. We all saw the video of the evacuation from the tube caught by an ordinary person with a camera phone. We also saw the story in the New York Times that featured an amateur photograph. The BBC in London was quick to respond to the story of the disaster and secured the rights to as much amateur coverage as they could. That picture in the New York Times came from the BBC, not Reuters or AP. But it could have, if Reuters or AP had a network of citizen journalists with camera phones. These are the companies that have to build the last mile of their networks into the pockets of ordinary people if they are to compete in a media future that distributes information through fewer links on the value chain with decreasing friction and time.
In the near term, the opportunity is for the incumbent news media companies to embrace citizen journalism by attaching themselves to the technology that is bridging the gap between what is essentially millions of mobile freelance stringers and their front door.
That having been said, this morning was a reminder to me that we are about to see a revolution across all media which gives ordinary people like you and me the greatest opportunity ever to affect significant change to the existing media infrastructure. In the past twenty years, technology has been pushing media production farther to the edge of the network. Desktop publishing, at the time, was a major step forward toward putting previously expensive production services into the hands of anyone with a computer and a laser printer. Then point-and-click website production tools fueled explosive growth of the web. Recently blogging has challenged many incumbent media industries like journalism and PR and has fundamentally altered the way businesses have to communicate with their customers and other interested stakeholders.
This change is good. More and more power is being shifted to the edge of the network where consumers have the tools to build an audience and exert influence like never before. Communication in general is being routed through fewer links on the value chain and as a result is becoming more raw, more pure and more personal. The farthest edge of the network in the media world is into the pocket of the mobile citizen who know has the equivalent of a broadcast network in their pocket. And that mobile citizen is connected to every other mobile citizen through the wireless networks and a series of overlapping personal networks based on friendship, affinity or even just a keyword.
Think about that – I was here in New York and captured a moment that may have been interesting to some other people in New York or around the world. The other people who saw it were able to connect to me directly. I got a few messages from other Rabblers asking me about various details, and I engaged in a short SMS dialog with them, creating an interactive story for all of us and a flash community around the concept of the building collapse. In this way, Rabble is the glue that connects these mobile citizens by giving us a marketplace to transact our content.
Now think about this: This morning a half dozen people and I totally bypassed the newsvan, the cameraman, the reporter, the satellite uplink, the broadcast studio personnel, the news anchor on the air, the cable infrastructure, the television, the set-top box and the TiVo. What we used instead were camera phones, MMS, SMS, wireless data and the infrastructure of the wireless network operators which we payed for by the minute for the privelege of using to transact our media with the community.
The opportunity in the longer term belongs to the network operator. By providing the handsets, applications and networks for this user-generated content to flow between their users, they become the new distribution giants for a new kind of media that will put the cable industry and media incumbents on the ropes.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:12 AM
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May 23, 2005
Media Is Truth
...and sometimes that is good, and sometimes not so much
Interesting few weeks for Newsweek. So let me get this straight: I can establish a magazine tomorrow and by doing so I am automatically protected by the first amendment to publish whatever I want, which is a fundamental freedom that separates this great country from many others. As a test of this great freedom, I can print a story that based on my diligent fact gathering and vetting process I believe to be truthful, however inflammatory, in the interest of reporting the Truth. If I can publish a story that is offensive enough, people in other countries might riot and I can singlehandedly damage international relations for years to come.
Getting The Shit Back In The Horse
When things get really out of hand, my government’s State Department will conduct international damage control to quell the unpalatable results of my offensive story. Then when my country’s president finally calls to tell me my inflammatory story is threatening our nation’s interests abroad, I will just rescind it. I will issue a brief press release that says, “I retract the story,” and all will be fine. And that is when the party really gets started.
One needn’t discuss the morality of war, political tactics or the influence religion can have on a great many people to understand the fundamental issue here. The Newsweek article has turned into an examination of the concept of Truth. Was the Newsweek article true? I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter because in any case Truth is very much a matter of public opinion, and the damage has already been done. But it puts the incumbent media companies in a difficult position: If the story was not true, then the vetting process, the basic journalistic integrity of the organization and the very notion of self-regulated freedom of the press gets called into question. If the story was true, but was rescinded because of political pressures, then the vetting process, the basic journalistic integrity of the organization and the very notion of self-regulated freedom of the press gets called into question. Either way, the media incumbent loses. Either their process is broken and some senator somewhere is preparing a bill to regulate news media and we are a few strokes away from losing the freedom of the press or their process is sound and their retraction was based on political pressure and we have already lost the freedom of the press.
Truth in a one-way distribution channel is Propaganda
Media Is Truth, and that truth has been flowing one-way for so long that we had come to believe it until it really started to get out of hand. “They couldn’t print it if it weren’t true” is a cliché we now use to mockingly defend supermarket tabloid headlines. “Man stuck in refrigerator eats own foot to survive.” But a tabloid is just entertainment, and even though the information is presented as fact, the journalistic construct does not apply to them.
Then the NYT had their scandal, and it was shocking for a moment that the NYT would fabricate news. Shocking. But in the back of your mind you were calculating the likelihood of the very same thing happening at other newspapers around the world just based on sheer numbers the same way you rationally calculate the likelihood of life on other planets. “Well, there are billions of stars, and we assume a lot of them have planets, and some of those probably look like Earth…” and so on, and you come up with a very good likelihood that life exists on other planets, just like there is a good likelihood that many other newspapers around the world have fabricated stories.
Then Dan Rather ended his career in a fairly spectacular way, and it was shocking for a moment that CBS News would fabricate news. Shocking. But again it made you think, didn’t it? I mean, you don’t believe everything you see on TV, but you did generally assume that you could trust CBS News to convey the Truth, right?
And so you went to the internet. Now, if you cannot believe everything you see on TV, then you certainly cannot believe everything you see on the internet. But the internet is different in that you can plug into the blogosphere for a few minutes to explore an issue and weigh the thousands of results you find for yourself. You find some opinion, some fact, some agenda-promoting half-truths, some lies and some pure fiction. But there is strength in numbers. What you find in the blogosphere is a sort of user-generated zeitgeist that enables you to arrive at the truth or whatever version of it you choose to believe in. It isn’t perfect, but at least it engages the consumer in a dialog of truth rather than pushing it at them primetime news-style.
Distributing Truth at the edge of the network
Rather than making one organization the arbiter of truth, with their story told through the lens of their one camera and spoken from their reporter’s one voice, put the cameras into everybody’s hands and give them a tool to swarm around the truth from multiple perspectives. When the masses are able to render their version of the truth in a forum of public opinion, interesting patterns emerge that can act as a sort of populist bullshit meter. When citizen journalists are connected in a massively multi-user environment that enables them not only to record events as they happen but also to distribute their media rapidly, corrupted elections can be identified, unfavorable leaders can be ousted from power and false police reports can be refuted.
This distributed network of content creators can have other benefits, too. For instance, recently T-Mobile upgraded their voicemail system, and it has caused me and several other people problems that are evidently difficult for T-Mobile to identify and correct. Derrick wrote about it on his blog a few months ago, and now he gets a dozen hits per day from people searching for “tmobile voicemail problem.” So apparently many people have had the same problem. This would be valuable information for T-Mobile to know as a way to collect these edge-case user problems and more rapidly address them. All they have to do is give Derrick a special number or link to post on his blog so that he can route the hits to them. (He asked them to do this, but customer support does not currently acknowledge that there is any problem.)
There is also a huge opportunity for incumbent news media companies. Rather than look at mobloggers as a threat, the news organizations should be embracing these mobile citizen journalists as stringers. If I worked at Reuters, I would love to have a million people out in the field recording events as they happen working for me for free. People would do it for attribution alone because they simply want to share important news.
The good thing about distributing truth is that if you have a very large number of people rendering their version of the truth, the chances of collusion and promotion of a singular interest are reduced, and what you are left with is a bell curve of opinions. The center of the bell curve usually represents the most reliable version of the truth, though it could simply represent the most people who are wrong about something. And that is where the journalistic vetting process could be applied to improve the entire process overall, turning news organizations into packagers and enablers of truth rather than editors of truth, which has led to a certain growing distrust of the news media industry in general.
The Upstream Truth
Whenever something really big happens, it happens before any reporter or newsvan can get there to report on it. The first pictures and video we see of a major event are always amateur footage. The truth is something we often find out after the fact. The biggest problem with Truth is that if you weren’t there to witness it with your own eyes, it cannot be trusted. So what if there was a marketplace to transact the truth? What if the people who witness the truth could share it with the world in real time as it happens? What if the actual pictures and video of life as it happens could be posted directly from the source to a place to share? That is the link on the value chain that is missing right now. People are buying camera phones faster than any other consumer electronic device. But they aren’t using them as much as they could be using them. Missing is the direct link between a user’s camera phone and a place to post media to show the world and a marketplace to transact that media across a massively scalable system or overlapping personal networks. This story on Reuters today concurs with this point of view.
Rabble solves this problem and gives consumers this missing link on the value chain. I have said before that the hype around downstream media (TV on your phone) is misplaced and overblown. The real opportunity in mobile media is providing the tool to everyone to create upstream media and share it as widely as possible.
Rabble is now ready to launch, and we are unveiling it at the upcoming BREW conference in San Diego on June 1st. Come check it out, won't you? If you would like to learn more, please feel free to drop me an email.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 01:18 PM
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May 03, 2005
Little Brother: Building The Yellow Pages of Non-Yellow Pages Information (3 of 3)
Big Brother tells you what to buy.
Big Brother tells you what to buy through big channels called advertising, the biggest of which has traditionally been TV. My Orwellian nightmare is already quite complete without having to add this to it, but alas here I am, the glow of my television’s advertisements for soap, cars, packaged foods and branded beverages washing over me, practically pulling me into the store. Or is it?
Media Networking is an important concept to make sure my Orwellian nightmare doesn’t extend to advertising, too. By pushing production of media to the edge of the network (into the hands of individual prosumers with mobile connected PMDs) we democratize information in two very important ways: 1) What gets produced and 2) How it gets distributed. In my two previous posts I discussed how these changes can increase the truthfulness of media, which can have an impact in some unexpected ways including on civil liberties, and also how this evolution of communication can be a huge opportunity for marketers so long as they understand that they are entering into a discussion with Fans, not pushing a message. Now how about Media Networking as the fully decentralized marketing channel of the future?
Remember when Jim Stengel, Global Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble said “today’s marketing model is broken”? It’s no surprise that the world’s biggest advertiser doesn’t think it is getting a good value from Television advertising. The entire media model is decentralizing right before our eyes. The number of impressions may be increasing, but your ability to capture an audience of any size has increasingly less to do with scheduling and primetime programming paradigms of yore and increasingly more to do with your ability to create wildfire; distribution through a series of overlapping personal networks, Paris Hilton video-style. Get that kind of distribution consistently whether the message is for a bar of soap or a celebrity sex tape, and marketers will beat a path to your door. But of course you cannot, nor do you need to. You have to do something far easier but far scarier for marketers: You simply have to push the creation and distribution of the message to the farthest edge of the network, namely to the individual prosumer with a personal media device. Marketers need to get their heads around the concept of building a brand by sharing it with their customers.
Fans Create Media To Associate Themselves…
First think about how Media Networking leads to a redefinition of media. If I take a picture of my favorite band during a concert and I tag that information with a location, in this case the venue where the band performed, that additional information increases the shelf life of my media far beyond the point in time when I created it. In fact, in this example if my media is findable by other people, I have just created a location-based relational advertisement for the venue. Now what if I know that my favorite band is going to be at a different venue in a month’s time? I can use the same media I created before, attach it to a different venue and create a notification that an event is going to take place. I am using media to communicate, as a Fan, something important about my favorite band.
Here is what I like about this example: You cannot get this information in the yellow pages. I am seeing a lot of hype around mobile search and directory, and it is an important area, but I have Vindigo and it’s really useful and as long as they keep improving it, it is the only yellow pages type of directory I need. Google and Yahoo will offer mobile search products sometime in the future, but they can’t be much better than Vindigo except possibly in user interface and design because the data is homogenous and they all sort of get it from the same place anyway.
…Then Share Their Media With Others…
I am not just talking about a way to build a sort of WikiPages. I am talking about tribal knowledge – the relevance of a community-generated directory is higher to the community than to outsiders. On a more personal level, it is also true that the relevance of user-generated content has concentric rings of relevance moving outward from the person who generated the content. The closer you are to that person, (I mean in concept, like Friendship, but this also now includes geographically) the more relevant the media is to you as useful information.
…As Customer Evangelists…
Here is an example: This past weekend we went to a fundraising thing for our favorite brewery, Stone Brewing Co. For a tax-deductible donation, you get to put a stone from your backyard into this gigantic wall in their new brewing facility and restaurant. I live in a high rise, so I chipped a big chunk of concrete out of my post-tension slab floor. That’s okay, right? I love Stone, btw. Their Ruination IPA is a liquid poem to the glory of the hop. Anyway, my friend Tristan and her husband from Switchvox (which powers our phone system for a fraction of what it would have cost with any other solution) were going to meet us there and so she sent me an SMS to get directions to the Stone Brewing construction site. She called me rather than dialing 411. This is to a construction site, so she knew 411 wouldn’t have an address yet and certainly wouldn’t have a phone number for it. She also knew that the number she could get for the corporate office wouldn’t have helped her on a Saturday anyway. So she called me as the most direct route to the information she sought.
…Who Add To Their Media Their Own Biases…
Think about how often we do this. The yellow pages might give a number for a restaurant, but does it tell you whether it’s a good restaurant? Even if it did, you would trust the opinion of a friend of yours more, and so you call your friend and ask their opinion. In fact, with surprising frequency, we call our friends to help us find places, get recommendations and connect with other people that we know they know. It’s all for a specific purpose and usually is just-in-time; the shortest path to the information we seek.
…Which Others End Up Trusting More…
Furthermore, we experience life based on our common interests and knowledge with other people – when we decide what movie to see, where to work, how to live, who’s cool, what’s hot, what’s not, and why. In fact, we tend to rely on people all around us who aren’t even our friends – every time we ask someone for directions or where the nearest gas station is, we are relying on a flash community of people around us to conduct our lives.
What would a tool that enables, amplifies and defrictionalizes this consumer behavior look like? I have seen it. This is Media Networking. The media I create may be useful to only one other person or it may be useful to many people. If they can access it using a remote control with a map interface to find Stone Brewing Co., a good emo band playing tonight or directions to the rave, that media turns into information. None of this information can ever be found in the yellow pages, and it is, at the right point in space and time, considerably more useful than the yellow pages and 411 combined.
…Which Turns Everyone Into A Storefront…
So back to my friend Tristan. Rather than me having to transpose the content from the back of the envelope I had written it on and push the content to her via SMS, she should be able to go to my channel and pull it across. And so should anyone else. In fact, to Tristan this is tribal knowledge because she expected to find that content there but to everyone else who may happen upon it by browsing the area or possibly searching for “beer” it becomes an advertisement, and one that they didn’t spend any time or money to create because I, a major Fan, did it for them. And customers will create your next advertisement for you.
…Which Means Big Changes For Incumbent Media Companies.
Media is changing is such a fundamental way that everything around it - advertising, directory, search, information, publicity, marketing, promotion – is changing as well. Blogging is just the nascent beginning of an avalanche of change that looks to me like the most exciting and wide-open opportunity facing us today. It will be interesting to see what happens to when a dark horse media titan challenges the status quo of some of the other segments of the $1.4 trillion media industry. I guess I'll say it again if you aren't getting too tired of hearing it: The Location-aware Media Networking Operator (LMNO) is the media heavy of tomorrow.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 04:02 PM
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May 02, 2005
Little Brother: Media Sharing Isn’t Stealing (2 of 3)
Media Networking Is A New Form Of Evolved Communication With Massive Positive Implications For Media Incumbents
When Napster first came out (the first, really cool P2P one, not the current…one) it was evident that it existed for one very difficult to mask purpose: Stealing music. People said, “No no no, I’m sharing my music,” but let’s all be honest with ourselves – we knew we were getting away with something. It was produced content that was intended for distribution and consumption in a particular format, and we were punking the record labels by opening up another channel for the content that cut them and their business model out of it. That wasn’t media “sharing” it was media stealing. I believe intellectual property rights owners have the final say on what happens to their very valuable assets and should be able to embrace technology to the extent they choose to further promote and distribute their content safely and without the threat of losing control of their assets. Given the efficacy of P2P file swapping services, there isn't a record label executive alive who wouldn't want to use it to promote a new artist as long as they could define the promotional period after which the content converts to some other business model (like paid.) But such is the problem with transformative technologies - they force incumbents to rethink their business models and find another way to make money.
Media Sharing is P2P Marketing And Promotion
But there is an opportunity to invite consumers to talk about your intellectual property to promote it. That is what every intellectual property owner wants because it sells more of the packaged version of their intellectual property, whether it is an album, song, movie, book or whatever. When I go to a concert and take a picture of the band on stage and send it to a friend, I am promoting the band. But look at how I am doing it. I am paying money to send a piece of media to someone in my personal network of friends because I am such a huge fan that I wanted to share my positive experience with someone. Media sharing is the technological evolution of interpersonal communication.
Before the era of my Verizon Wireless VX8000 camcorder phone, my parents went to a concert, (well, not my square parents, but maybe yours did) enjoyed it and then had to wait until the next day when they happened to run into a friend and they would both dismount their dinosaurs and talk about how good the concert was.
The concept here is Media Networking. Because of the powerful technology baked into the device in my hand, rather than talk about it, I can capture multimedia of the moment and zap it to my channel immediately to share with the world. If one picture tells a thousand words, Media Networking is like a conversation on steroids, replete with pictures, audio and video to convey a depth of thought and emotion that mere words cannot adequately express.
Chuck Olsen is my new friend, though I don’t even know him. Check out his video of a concert he went to where The Soundtrack Of Our Lives was playing their seriously cool tune “Bigtime.”
TSOOL is a great band. I just bought their CD. You should, too.
Like I said, I don’t even know Chuck, but a friend of mine knows a guy who saw Chuck’s video on ourmedia.org and I really appreciate his sharing it with me. Chuck is a typical Fan. Rather than telling a few friends about how great the show was or going up to a mountain top and yelling it down to the valley below or writing a review of the show on his blog, he took a snapshot of the moment in very low quality video to give other people a first-hand idea of how great TSOOL really is.
Think of Media Networking as an indexing system connecting a database of people. Unlike social networking, where each record is related to every other one in a hierarchical fashion (she has two friend and they have two friends and so on and so on) Media Networking connects people through the media they create and share in a massively relational way. So you and I both like TSOOL and that is the glue that connects us, but we wouldn’t know it unless one of us expressed it in some way. And what better way than using the media production and consumption device formerly known as the mobile phone that you have in your pocket when you go to their concert?
Today, this isn’t really possible from your mobile phone - the one device that you carry with you everywhere that has the multimedia capabilities to produce and consume content in real time. There is a link on the value chain that is missing. You can take a picture or video clip and you can attach it to an email and send it to one person, and sometimes not outside your carrier’s network. Rabble is the link that has been missing: A marketplace to post the media you create with your mobile device and a media networking infrastructure that enables you to communicate with other people through the media you and they create.
Good Or Bad For Incumbent Media Companies?
Media companies would love to embrace Media Networking as a promotional mechanism, and many of them do. Every record label maintains a mailing list of their bands’ fans to try to create community and build hype, knowing that word of mouth promotion is not only free but has the added and crucial benefit of the associated street cred you simply cannot buy at any price.
The problem for incumbent media companies starts when they cannot control the message. The marketers nightmare is creating a frictionless flow of information about their product that propagates a negative message. This happens with movies today. It used to be that if you made a bad movie, you could at least buy your first weekend’s box office take by heavily promoting the movie in the days right before the weekend. Information used to move so slowly that by the time everyone got back to work or school on Monday to speak ill of your bad movie, you already had a decent weekend. But now, people are sending text messages and capturing video clips of particularly bad scenes and sending them to their friends before the movie is even over.
So what’s a movie studio to do? If your movie is really good, the same effect can propel your movie even higher than you expected with no additional cost. Do you try to tell people they can’t send text messages from movie theaters to protect yourself from the negative effect of making a bad movie or do you encourage it because it is a way to pump up your good movie?
In this way, Little Brother is making sure Big Brother doesn’t make bad movies. (Little Brother is also rewarding Big Brother whether the movie is good or bad with a sort of instant massive marketing feedback group thumbs up or thumbs down.) The movie studios should be ecstatic about this, btw, because it forces them to create better products so that they can better do what they do to make money: Pander to consumers by giving them what they want in exchange for ten bucks. Hollywood makes so many truly fantastic movies that it is always a little surprising to me that after decades of honing the business of making movies a bad one can even see the light of day.
Incumbent media companies have a huge opportunity to involve the consumers of their content in the promotion of their content by engaging them in Media Networking. By allowing the technologically evolved version of my best description of a song or concert or movie to propagate through a series of overlapping personal networks, media incumbents can enable a new kind of super-word-of-mouth promotion for their media. By doing so, they can create not just consumers but true Fans, who will go far out of their way to organize and promote to everyone they know (and many people they don’t know) something that they truly identify with. As long as the media they allow users to capture, attach to and associate with is truly promotional to all rights holders concerned and is not the same content that they wish to sell in some other channel, this is a huge and largely untapped opportunity to mobilize fans to promote their content.
TrustKill Records, Capitol Records and Columbia Records are all using Rabble to promote their artists in this way. In mid-May when Rabble launches, Fans of bands like Hopesfall, Aslyn and Acceptance will be able to connect with their beloved artists, view their blogs, find their tour dates and locations and interact with a community of other Fans built around the concept of Media Networking on their mobile devices. Because the content is all server-based, it cannot be punked Napster1.0-style and the media participants, in this case the record labels, can control to what extent they network with their fan bases. It's a simple concept, but one that the industry has been trying to figure out for awhile and now it is finally possible and I want to thank our partners with pioneering vision at TrustKill, Capitol and Columbia for embracing our mobile media networking technology.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 10:46 AM
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April 29, 2005
Little Brother: Watching Big Brother (1 of 3)
User-Generated Media Is The Only Reason We Are Not Living In An Orwellian Nightmare
When George Orwell suggested in his techno-futurist dystopian novel “1984” that citizens would voluntarily walk around with devices that transmitted their location to a centralized authority twenty four hours per day, it was one of many preposterous features of a society enabled by technology to go terribly wrong. He further envisioned the “telescreen” which is both a receiver and a transmitter. It incessantly relays messages from the Party and simultaneously allows the dreaded “thought police” to tune into the activities of any individual at any given time. Control of the news and entertainment are centralized and controlled under The Ministry of Truth.
Welcome To My Orwellian Nightmare
Today, I carry around a device that transmits my location to a centralized authority twenty four hours per day – my mobile phone. I have a 50” flat-screen TV just like the ones Orwell said would be in every home, and my TiVo knows my every media consumption move, right down to how many times I rewinded and watched the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the superbowl. Control of the news and entertainment are centralized under a small handful of media conglomerates that dictate what I read, watch, hear and therefore to some extent, believe.
A Quick Look Back
Orwell published his classic in 1949, a time well before cell phones, set-top boxes and global domination of media by a small handful of megacorporations. The entire decade was dominated by World War II, the end of which launched the U.S. to the status of world superpower, challenged only by the USSR, which precipitated the Cold War based on a deep ideological divide, making communism (in this country anyway) a four-letter word. At the same time all of this was happening, television had just been made commercially available in 1947 with 13 stations and ENIAC, the first digital computer was completed in 1945. Hitler was eliminating artists who disagreed with his ideals. Many of them fled to America and influenced the art scene, as the center of the art universe moved from Paris to New York. Art became more abstract to show raw emotion and the school of Abstract Expressionism was born, chaotic and shocking to maintain its humanity during a time of insanity.
It is easy to see how George Orwell’s vision was developed at the intersection of new technology and the sociopolitical mood of the era, leading to the conclusion that technology could be deployed in a manner that centralizes and limits the flow of information to the people, thus eliminating individualism, democracy and freedom. Orwell wrote, "with the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end."
Orwell made that statement because he assumed the receiving and transmitting would be to and from a centralized Ministry of Truth. When media is created at the center of the network and broadcast outward, control of the message is possible because there is a bottleneck through which the message must pass. It is at that point that the controller of the media can influence the message to promote a particular opinion, ideal or agenda. This is fine, by the way, as long as the consumer of that media understands that they are consuming an opinion, ideal or agenda. When they do not, the media adopts the additional attributes that change its definition to propaganda.
I agree with Orwell that in a world where media production is centralized, technology can serve to limit rather than increase access to information, particularly the kind that is presented in a fair and balanced way.
The Opportunity Now
Well, I have an instrument that can receive and transmit simultaneously. It is my Verizon Wireless VX8000 camcorder phone and I carry it with me everywhere I go. Contrary to Orwell’s statement, though, I do not feel like my private life has come to an end. Rather, I feel that my transmitter/receiver is the beginning of a totally new media era that puts me in control of what I consume, but most importantly will soon enable me to consume content that other people have created and will enable them to consume content that I have created. The possibility of a massively multiuser participative mobile media network is right around the corner, and it is the thing that is going to kill the incumbent media companies unless they figure it out.
If they do figure it out, (and I mean in the way Kodak should have figured out the whole digital camera thing) it will accelerate a fundamental shift in the global media industry from centralized controller to distributed enabler. That would likely be a good (and very profitable) thing to do but would likely require the planned deconstruction of existing business models that have such organizational inertia driving them that it could be very painful to do. (Sort of like Kodak planning to get out of the film business and investing heavily in digital camera technology development.) I must say that in a lot of ways, I hope they do figure it out, because the benefit will be to consumers.
Little Brother Keeping Big Brother In Check
Let’s say you were near the 2004 Republican National Convention where several people were protesting and getting arrested for their raucous and dangerous behavior. Let’s further suppose you were not protesting but were arrested anyway while riding by on your bicycle and the policeman who arrested you falsely stated in his police report that you were aggressively resisting arrest and were responding violently. THE POLICEMAN LIED, but who is the judge going to believe? I promise that it is not you. As ridiculous as it should sound that in this country abuse of power is so common at even the lowest levels of government that you could be victimized and falsely accused and possibly imprisoned when you have done nothing wrong, that is exactly what happened to more than a thousand people that day. Now let’s say to make matters worse that a heavily edited version of a video of your arrest (the only video the police thought existed) served to corroborate the lying police officer’s story and that video was intentionally edited for that purpose. The evidence gets stacked against you. But what if there were dozens of citizens who captured your arrest on their camcorder phones, showing the unquestionable truth of the matter, and presented the unedited video to the district attorney? Would the DA throw the case out? Yes, and that is exactly what happened at the 2004 Republican National Convention as reported on the front page of the New York Times.
Distributed Media Promotes Democracy
If this sort of thing happens with any frequency at all, (like more than once, ever) the more people we have walking around with mobile connected camcorders, the better. When media production and consumption is distributed at the farthest edge of the network, into the hands of each and every individual, there is a greater chance (though no guarantee) that the truth will come out. If democracy lives or dies by the will of the people, then giving the people the ability to express themselves and transact their shared thoughts, opinions and agendas in a marketplace unencumbered by the political or other slant of any centralized controller is a way to promote democracy, if only of thought.
I would be remiss to not mention that such a marketplace for user-generated media will start to exist about three weeks from today when our first product, Rabble, launches. Rabble is blogging evolved for the mobile space, enabling users to take full advantage of the powerful media production and consumption devices in their pockets to express themselves anytime and anywhere. Don’t you think the least you should do is express your freedom by expressing yourself with Rabble? Yes, I do too.
In the first chapter of Orwell’s “1984”, On April 4, 1984 Winston Smith does something that was certainly a thoughtcrime and could at the very least land him in a concentration camp: He starts a diary.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 10:17 AM
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