The Ed Techie

The demise of should

This is a difficult post to write, I'm trying to think some stuff through, so if it comes across like I'm a cross between Andrew Keen and Baroness Greenfield, then assume this is because I haven't articulated myself well, and not because I am such a hybrid of bad science and curmudgeon. (If I did I might look something like this:)

 

(Andrew Keen and Baroness Greenfield morph photo via morphthing)

In general, you will know that I think the internet is GOOD THING. I like it. I spend a lot of time there. If I could drink beer with it, I would. But one should consider that even good things are rarely all good. There are downsides to most things.

One of the downsides it seems to me about the net is the commonly quoted echo chamber effect. That is, we spend time with like minded people, and not listening to different voices. I don't buy this completely, stuff comes across my screen everyday that I didn't know, that challenges me, etc. But what I think the net does do is legitimise everything. In general this has been a good force too - people no longer feel isolated because they are different, they can find others like them. Of course, this can be negative, if you are a rabid racist, you don't have to suffer being told you are wrong by everyone, you can find other nutters online who will share your view.

We probably have an echo chamber continuum that goes something like:

• Wilful ignorance - these are people who know they are wrong, or at odds with society and deliberately seek out others of a like mind: Creationists, racists, conspiracy theorists, people who think Dan Brown is a good writer. That sort of thing. The point is you have to go out of your way to find similar viewpoints.
• Accidental ignorance - people who labour under a misapprehension, because their community, network or peers also possess it, or it is a subject they simply don't come across.
• Lazy tastes - people who are generally aware they could move beyond their comfort zones, but don't.
• Occasional venturers - this is probably most of us, we do occasionally stretch our beliefs or tastes, but also we enjoy the stuff we know and like.
• Radical explorers - those who always seek different ideas, and tastes.

My point is not about the first or even second of these categories, but more about the middle - we have seen the demise of any sense of compulsion or quality. There is no more 'should' anymore. Everything is okay. Again, this is largely beneficial to people and society. There is no pressure to say, get married because you feel you 'should' (or live a conventional lifestyle). Saying goodbye to should is one of the great social forces of the 21st century.

But as we wave goodbye to it, we should also ponder what we lose by its demise. The loss of any sense of artistic quality is one aspect which I will miss. The notion of 'quality' in any artistic endeavour took a serious blow with postmodern relativism - everything was valid as an artform. And, again, this has been positive - I like that I don't have to hide my penchant for horror movies and can engage in pretentious discussions about the merits of various 1980s trashy movies with Jim Groom.

But I was always aware that there was more, that one 'should' try and read classics. It was 'should' that led me to Joseph Conrad and Flaubert. Should suggested I try listening to jazz. And should sat me down and made me watch  Nouvelle Vague cinema. All of these have been good things and have pushed my appreciation of cinema, literature and music across genres: that is, I have become a better reader of all novels because I have read Flaubert; and I enjoy Japanese horror because I learnt from French cinema, and so on.

My feeling is that what started with postmodernism has been exacerbated by the net. People's current tastes are always legitimised and there is no compulsion to go further. Thus we have a society that thinks Harry Potter is literature. It's not - maybe (and I am really stretching my maybes here) it's okay as a read, but there is more. And there is more to cinema than comic book adaptations. So, while we might cheer the demise of should in general, we should perhaps mourn the passing of it with regards to society's artistic sensibilities.

But all this is just a vague feeling I have, maybe there's nothing to it.

Ownership ain't what it used to be

I recently signed up for Spotify, a music service that allows you to find, and listen to, whole tracks and albums. It's less social than LastFM, say, but more focused around the specific music you want - whereas LastFM uses the artist you like as a springboard for finding other artists, Spotify uses it just to give you that artist's music.

It brought back to me some considerations I'd had about the nature of ownership. My generation will have a distinctly different concept of ownership to that of my daughter's generation. For my generation you partly constructed your identity around what you owned - your bookshelf, record collection and DVD archive were important aspects of who you were (as anyone who has read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity will appreciate). But for the digital generation this strong link with ownership has been broken.

It took time and money to build up any of those collections. Therefore they demonstrated a commitment which was worth exhibiting. In a digital world this effort is greatly reduced, and as a result so is the emotional attachment one feels towards them. How often would people say that their book collection or record collection would be the things they would want to save from a burning house? This simply doesn't apply anymore - you can just download again (iTunes keeps a record of what you've purchased or you just download ahem, free, versions from BitTorrent).

But even more than this, the need to own anything is reduced. Imagine a service like Spotify greatly increased so you could find any artist, and with mobile devices, get access anywhere. Why do I need to own any of these tracks then? I can get them whenever I want, and isn't that the point of ownership, to have access under your control?

Obviously there are some things you still need to own (clothes, cars, phones, etc), but if so many previously coveted items move to cloud services, what will the next generation cherish? I think the answer is evident already in where they spend their time - it's in their identity. This was one of the functions of owning these items in the first place after all. For the digital generation things that cannot be easily duplicated will be important - this will be the MySpace or Facebook page they have generated over a long time, the network they have created. These represent the 'things I'd save from a fire' in an online world.

As for us? Ownership is a hard habit to break.

Top film titles in Wordle

Whilst watching one of my favourite films last night, John Carpenter's The Thing, I took the top 250 films from IMDB and ran them through Wordle, using English translations of titles where appropriate, and setting it to ignore commonly used words. Here is the result. I'm not sure it tells you much, except that sequels will bump you up a bit, and feminists might like to note the prominence of 'man', 'men' and 'Lord' (the last one all from the Lord of the Rings) while the only female terms that arise are Princess and Bride. In truth though it shows that in the top 250 there is little commonality in titles.

I hypothesised that this would not be the case for a genre, where you would see greater use of similar terms, so not to let a half-baked hypothesis sit idle, I took the top 100 horror films from Best Horror Movies and put them through Wordle. And yes, look at the size of 'Dead'! Which sure proves something. I think.

My 7 stage plan for the film industry

<Image Last Curtain is Falling by Alex//Berlin http://flickr.com/photos/15082599@N08/2710899029/>

Alan Parker, Kenneth Branagh and assorted British film people wrote an open letter to the Times warning that piracy is undermining the creative industries. On the radio yesterday I heard the producer of Quantum of Solace stating how in the far east they don't make any money on DVD sales because everyone watches illegal copies. He bemoaned all the promotion and distribution costs they have to bear.

Sigh. They still really don't get it do they? They have one model which they keep returning to, again and again. They're supposed to be creative, so get creative about your own industry. Interestingly, they put forward the opposite argument back in the 1980s when home video first came on the scene. Then the argument was that it would detract from cinema revenue and result in the collapse of the film industry. Then they realised that they could make as much, if not more, money from video rentals and sales and now they see it as some hallowed right to retain. Just as they were slow to understand the potential for home video so they are being slow to appreciate what the online world offers. Their only response to the internet at the moment is to think of it as another distribution medium - DVD online, for the same fee.

So, if any executives want to hire me on an expensive consultancy, here is my seven stage plan for what they should do.

1. Accept the inevitable, don't fight it. When content becomes digital it will be freely distributed online. It's not as if they haven't had enough advance warning from the music industry about this. So don't waste your energy in trying to invent ever more restrictive DRM (which some teenager will hack the following week), or more aggressive legislation (which alienates your audience and can never be fully effective), or putting political pressure on Governments (who understand the issue even less than you do). Instead put your effort into finding a workable solution in the new landscape.
2. Look at some of those costs. Distribution? Packaging? They're going to disappear. Marketing? Will need to be redirected. Actors? Well, maybe they are demanding $20million per picture because they know the profits you are making. If you're making less, they'll get less. A lot of your current costs are based on your current model - the model shouldn't exist just to justify these costs.
3. Be the iTunes of film. Develop a super- cool, massive bandwidth, good social interaction site with a huge database.
4. Make downloads or streaming cheap enough that some people will pay over downloading pirates eg. $1 a film. 
5. Use advertising. Make downloads free, but with some obligatory, can't be skipped adverts at the start.
6. Offer subscription service which gives extra functionality - commentaries, webcasts from the crew, sneak previews, invites to pre-screening, etc.
7. Make the cinema the experience - films still have the cinema as their main source of revenue. This is not a zero-sum game: A lot of people who download a film have either already seen it in the cinema, or wouldn't go and see it there anyway. Not every download is a cinema seat lost. Cinema going is still a social activity (what else would teenagers do on first dates?), and they should utilise this even more than they do currently.

Listphile - a man thing?

(via Dan Taylor) I have had a play with Listphile a site that lets you (yes you've guessed it) create and share lists. Yes, that's it - it never ceases to amaze me how small some of the ideas behind these web 2.0 startups are. You create a list which you can pull different media in to and others can edit it.

Although it's a small idea, you can see how this might grow. Rather like the real world, in the online world there is an almost infinite variety of very small ecological niches that some company (organism) will exploit. Making and sharing lists won't change your life, but it is something we do a lot. I used to carry a  personal top ten films, novels, Spurs players lists in my head, which were often readjusted, as if I was going to be asked by a journalist for these at any moment. I think this is a man thing, men like making lists (readers of this blog will know I'm not averse to a list).

So, just to test it out, and not because I like making lists or anything, here's my Asian horror film list. Feel free to add to, or edit, it.

I was going to add in some potential educational uses here to justify my playing with it, but instead (in a smug, postmodern, self referential way) I've created a Listphile list - Educational uses of Listphile. Actually when you start doing this it does seem like a really useful tool - I've done this list with a formal education cohort of students in mind, but you could apply the same to a broader subject community. Some of these would be really useful I think - best research question and best resource in particular. So much so, I think I'll add them in to my course next year. I would really like you to add this list (the Asian horror one, less so).

Thunderbirds are go(ish)

Ellen (my daughter) has a new favourite film, Thunderbirds. This was widely panned on release, and in truth it's not a classic. But I understand why she likes it. This is a tough sell, but I'm going to argue that Thunderbirds is a better film than The Incredibles. Well, it's a better film for kids. Ellen didn't really get The Incredibles, but Thunderbirds is aimed directly at kids. Which is why of course adult film reviewers don't get it. Kids apply a different set of criteria. All the adult in-jokes that have become the stock in trade of Pixar films are lost on kids. This has a secret island, lots of kids beating adults, some cool machines, etc. So what if the characters, script and dialogue is rubbish?

I've not convinced you have I?