extensions

A couple of weeks ago, on a Thursday night, I came home and put on the DVR, expecting to watch LOST. To my dismay, the recorder, for whatever reason (damn computers…), decided not to record it that night. So I thought I would try watching the free, streaming version off ABC’s web site the following night.

Not fun.

Before my complaining, though, it’s worth discussing a bit about how we use media. Television is one-way — we sit back on the couch, and we soak it in. The Internet is interactive — we proactively click on things to make other things happen. Dan Harries, in an essay titled “Watching the Internet” from his 2002 The New Media Book, summarizes these two somewhat opposing media practices, and calls for something new:

…one of the central modes encouraged by the internet is that of ‘viewing’, literally the online viewing of movies in a manner that loosely emulates the viewing of films in the cinema…A second mode is that of ‘using’ new media with users following more ‘computer oriented’ activities, such as exploring hyperlinked Web pages or playing online games…Yet what happens when both of these modes are integrated in a manner where the using affects the viewing, and vice versa?…I call this third emerging mode of spectatorship ‘viewsing’ — the experiencing of media in a manner that effectively integrates the activities of both viewing and using…

Viewsing is something like what MIT’s Henry Jenkins calls “convergence.” It’s the new form of participatory media we see emerging all over.

Now, getting back to LOST. The series certainly has strong viewsing elements to it — the fans are completely engaged, and the producers are not only aware of this, but use their fans’ feedback, incorporating it into the narrative. (Season Three’s “Expose” episode, for example, where Nikki and Paolo were killed off, was largely a gift to the fans, who never warmed up to those characters.)

But the experience of watching LOST online was terrible, because it incorporated the worst elements of “using” and “viewing” the web. The HD-quality stream looks great, and, connected to the home theater system, provides a terrific “viewing” experience. We dimmed the lights, sat back on the couch, and soaked it in. Until…

The commercials. Which are fine; we’re all used to that (although watching LOST on a DVR allows you to roll past them). But you’re not just required to watch the commercials — you physically have to click on the “continue” link on the web page to see the rest of the show. And this happens several (five or six?) times throughout the episode.

So much for sitting back on the couch and watching in HD.

Obviously, the producers assume most people watching are doing so at a desk, or on a laptop. But with Apple TV, and other web/video delivery mechanisms that continue to push media onto our 36″+ HD screens, watching the Internet becomes an increasingly passive experience — more “viewing” than “using.”

Until media producers figure that out, I’m hoping my DVR doesn’t forget to record LOST anymore…

techPresident reports on recent Twitter crashes:

First Macworld, now the State of the Union. Several times during tonight’s SOTU address Twitter’s servers were overloaded, preventing users of the popular micro-blogging service from sending or receiving tweets for several minutes at a time.

A scan of Twitter’s public timeline during the speech showed a number of tweets about Bush’s (hopefully) last address to Congress. Personally, I got a flurry of tweets commenting on the speech from the people I follow on Twitter.

I’ve noticed this, too. Both the slowdown, this morning, for example, when the news came that John Edwards dropped out of the race, as well as the increasing number of people I follow talking about events as they happen: Heath Ledger’s death, the SOTU (all not-so-favorable of Bush…), the Tom Cruise video.

For some reason, perhaps that it’s much “lighter” than other apps, when Twitter crashes, it’s not all that bad. It’s just an annoyance, at least for now.

But the larger point is, Twitter seems to be growing; it’s increasingly a place where people go to talk about what’s happening around them.

I’m watching with interest, as well as participating in, Bryant Park Project’s fun little experiment with Twitter. Or, as they call it: the twitter-lution.

Others have written about the potential here, as old media (no offense, NPR radio people…) mixes with new. What’s most interesting to me is to see how it’s actually playing out, how both the folks at BPP and the fans are all trying to get a sense of this interesting community of real-time, 140-characters-or-less virtual beings in cyberspace. The somewhat inevitable cocktail party metaphor has been used, and as well the somewhat more intriguing “coffee at the local diner.” The latter, in fact, was the inspiration for BPPDiner, a Twitter account that scoops up any and all tweets containing the expression “bpp” — a neat way, once you’re following the account, to find other BPP fans who are talking about the show.

For those folks who still don’t get it, if the cocktail party and diner metaphors just aren’t enough, the most insightful description of Twitter I’ve come across is in Wired, in this post by Clive Thompson, who finds all this tweeting something much more experiential and sensory-driven than anything else:

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

He calls this a “social sixth sense,” and I think that’s exactly right. Once you begin to use Twitter, and find a few interesting people to follow, you really do get a sense of “knowing,” at least to the extent you can know someone else you only know virtually.

This, therefore, leads us away from the web as something textual, to something more like what Erik Davis described in the late 1990s as “acoustic cyberspace.” A kind of “space” that’s much more immersive, much more experiential, at least as much “body” as it is “mind.”

And it’s this acoustic space that’s created with Twitter, as conversations happen in real-time (perhaps the cocktail party metaphor is entirely appropriate?), that makes this particular space “oral,” just as much as it is written. And this orality, in turn, brings people together, and creates exactly the kind of community that BPP’s twitter-lutionary experiment is creating within their audience.

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it…It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. - Jean Baudrillard

In Henry Jenkins’s “Origami” chapter, he discusses the transmedia trend, where producers create, instead of media productions, media “worlds.” The Wachowski’s “The Matrix” exemplifies this best, a blend of films, comics, videogames, and anime, all built on a foundation of metaphysics and mythology. And while I’ll admit to be completely caught up in the Matrix media world as anyone else (just like I’ve rummaged across the Internet looking for clues to an equally in-depth world, the world of LOST), I think it’s important to also keep a critical distance to these works.

At the top of the criticality list, in my opinion, is what Julian Dibbell has called “ludocapitalism”:

I’m suggesting that when the economic system of the world has come to such a pass that the labor of online gamers can contribute more to the global GDP than 2 out of 3 sovereign nations, then no proper account of that system can neglect to account for its relationship to play. And I’m arguing, finally, that that relationship is one of convergence; that in the strange new world of immateriality toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the insubstantial—the realm of games and make-believe. In short, I’m saying that Marx had it almost right: Solidity is not melting into air. Production is melting into play.”

Dibbell’s essay is excellent, and provides many examples of production melting into play, such as TopCoder, a business that offers programming competitions and sells the winning software (no profits go to the game winner, just the thrill of victory).

But this idea of ludocapitalism can exist in much more subtle ways. In cyberspace, the line between public and private is, necessarily, made obscure. There are no secrets in a networked culture, and there is a monetary value to this openness, but it doesn’t end up in our pockets. It’s essentially free labor.

Take the example of Google — they use our “work,” that is, the searches that make up the zeitgeist of the web, and sell it, in the form of ads. There’s also an element of marketing — what price can Google put on the word “google” becoming a verb?

This is the flip side, then, the mirror image of what Jenkins talks about in “Convergence.” The fun we have spoiling “Survivor” translates to higher ratings, higher ad rates, more profit. The clues to LOST planted across the net create a buzz around the show. Again, more profit. Each click of our mouse in the spirit of play can be monetized in the spirit of capitalism.

It’s summed up here, in another piece by Dibbell, on China’s gaming workshops:

“When I was a worker,” Fan Yangwen, who is now 21 and in Donghua’s main office providing technical support, told me, “I loved to play because when I was playing, I was learning.” But learning to play or learning to work? I asked. Fan shrugged. “Both.”

Production, melting in play.

Microsoft invests in Facebook. And there is glee:

“Once a social operating system takes over a country it’s like it becomes the native language of that country,” said Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist who is bullish on Facebook and notes that Google’s Orkut dominates Brazil, Friendster dominates the Philippines and Facebook is becoming the dominant forum in the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

Facebook boosters say that social networking represents the future of online activity. Advertisers are attracted to these properties because they offer an opportunity to aim ads to particular users interested in their product or service.

Is Facebook, and social networking in general, the “social operating system” of the future? Maybe, and that’s why Microsoft is interested. Operating systems abstracted us from the inner workers of the computer. Web browsers abstracted us from the operating system. Why not a “social networking” layer?

But it seems like there are two big strikes against the Microsoft-Facebook deal becoming the Greatest Thing Ever. One, the fact that sites like Facebook are “attractive” to advertisers, likely just means “more ads” for the site’s users. Companies quickly forget about the users, and turn to making the next buck as the prime motivator for business.

The other problem is that Friendster, if you remember, at one point was the coolest site around. MySpace seems to have gone down in status, as people built up Facebook. Social networking sites seem to have a fickleness factor. More ads, and something else better comes around, and it’s a few billion dollars down the drain.

It very well may be that social networking sites are the new OS, but it’s not that clear that Facebook will remain at the center.

Most of the coverage around the recent Wikiscanner news is, inexplicably, something like, “OMIGOD people are changing things in Wikipedia!!!”

This Times article, though, seems to get it right, by highlighting, or at least simply mentioning, the most important aspect of the story:

Most of the corporate revisions did not stay posted for long.

This whole Wikipedia dust-up is really about how wikis actually work: people change things, other people notice it’s wrong, and those people make corrections.

The fact that people from Wal-Mart might be saying nice things about Wal-Mart, or people from Exxon might be trying to make Exxon look good, might be titillating, I guess, but hardly the real news here.

Last night, CNN and YouTube held their highly-anticipated debate. A few things came through loud and clear. First, despite whatever sea change (or not) this debate represented in our politics, the change was certainly one-sided — the candidates, for all the spontaneity of the questions posed, answered in essentially standard, rote responses. One the whole, there was little originality or emotion from the Democrats, certainly none that equalled the pointed, and often poignant, questions from the YouTubers.

And it was the questions — the user-generated content which fueled this political debate – that really marked a sweeping change. They were a fresh wind blowing through an all-too-often stodgy, boring process, a process that by and large stirs little interest beyond the “political junkie” class. (A class that has, of course, grown tremendously as political blogging has grown, but, overall, it’s a small subsection of the nation.) At its best, a YouTube-style debate can bring into the political discourse the voices of many previously disaffected citizens, especially within the ranks of young people.

But this debate also sets a marker — it very well may be the point where citizen journalism has finally arrived. The questions, of course, were not “journalism,” but this was the point where the voice of the citizen “officially” substituted itself for the voice of the journalist. The YouTube debate was a dialog between the citizenry and the politicians. It’s true that CNN moderated the debate, not only with the presence of Anderson Cooper, but, more importantly, by selecting the questions, instead of allowing the wisdom of the YouTube crowds to bring the “most popular” or “most viewed” or “most favorites” to the top. Still, having such personal and emotional questions asked by The People is a very powerful thing, and it is likely that this approach will be a permanent part of the political debate process going forward. It seems hard to imagine going back to a round table of journalists asking their “Serious” questions.

MIT Professor Henry Jenkins recently posted an interview with author and NYU Professor Stephen Ducombe, where they discussed not only the YouTube debate, but the significance of the emerging participatory culture and its impact on politics:

This demonstrates the awesome power - and talent - of the “audience.” This is, um, “poaching” at its best: political “fans” tapping into popular desire and, using pop culture language, delivering, a different message. At its worst this pop culture poaching leads to the Hillary Clinton Soprano’s ad: using all the style of popular culture but ignoring the deep seated reasons that such a series was popular. Clinton’s approach is just using pop culture a gimmick.

One of the things that interests me most about the explosion of media production is the multiplicity of messages and meanings that political campaigns have to contend with…We’ve already seen how fans of Barack Obama have used pop culture tropes to make him into a sex symbol and render Hillary Clinton as Big Sister. Political campaigns are just going to have to make peace with the fact that they can not control their message, and that the message is going to be determined, in part, by their fans. This means that “unacceptable” material is going to be part of the political discussion and decision making.

We can either bemoan this fact: the debasement of the political process and so on, or we can look for what might be more positive aspects. It could be argued that one of the things that’s wrong with electoral politics today is that what is considered “expectable” is determined by professional pundits, big media and those who make large campaign contributions. Consequently, what is of interest to the majority of us is left out of the discussion. Certainly, Obama Girl isn’t opening up a substantive political discussion of anything, but it’s very existence, and its popularity, suggests that we, the people, want something else, something more, than the sanitized, pre-packaged, content-free politician packages we’ve gotten in the past.

It’s difficult to deny that the YouTube Generation is having an impact on our culture, and on our politics. Last night’s CNN debate may just be the start.