digitaldust

I’m just cruising through the wikipedia and it’s interesting that sphere’s of academic disciplines overlap very heavily. Just using a wikiword to link between concepts (a very traditional hypertext method) leads to discipline bleed, you move into the definition of the word for another definition. The wikipedia is becoming something between a encyclopedia and a dictionary and not quite sure which it is. Also there are some highly technical descriptions of some terms.

I suppose the answer is to add more to each entry to describe the various jargon laden meanings. I also wonder if one could navigate through hypertext collections with some kind of subject specific sunglasses. Confine one’s self to a specific subject area. Mind you even that is a bit restrictive, borders between disciplines are breaking down and so they should. Cross-disciplinary bleed of concepts should be happening, just conflicting or misleading jargon is dangerous. I don’t know where I was going with this, except that I am generally impressed with the wikipedia since I last looked at it.

I’m sick today so I was lying in bed listening to the Today Programme on radio4 and there was this piece about selfish Christmas carol choirs. This guy was on complaining about the fact that Christmas choirs are hogging all the carols. He was saying and the presenter was agreeing that when one goes to a choir service - not that I do - the choir now sings most if not all and the congregation doesn’t sing. They had a representative from St Paul’s choir service who was on saying that it’s not a big change and that the congregation still participate by quiet prayer and contemplation. Whereas the presenter and the other guy were lamenting a lost time when everyone came and sang their heads off out of tune.

This seems to me more of the whole bowling alone phenomena. Organisations of participation (which the Church used to be, and very good at it in it’s time) are divorcing themselves from these small rituals of participation. Even though I might not be going to a carol service I find myself angry and appalled at the thought of not allowing a group of people to sing along with traditional carols, or marginalized by creating new ones that no one can actually sing along to. Not singing together to carols is a great example of the Putnam thing as well as the broadcast/performance mentality that grips the population.

It also brings to mind a documentary I was watching the other night on the origins of music. It seems that everyone in the “developed” world listens to more music than they used to, but the number of people making music is significantly less. This is all due to the mediation of recordable music. In “primitive” societies everyone makes music and they create rhythms all the time, music to work to, music to celebrate, music to communicate. The western world tries to make music professional and the non-developed world makes music participatory.

Hopefully we have reached the full pendulum swing to the small number of professional musicians and that advancing music technology is bringing the so called professional standard to the general public. The pendulum is swinging the other way and more people will be able to make music that others will take part in.

There seems to be an ever increasing amount of research around the concept of fame, or at least the New Scientist seems to be publishing more of it. Here’s a news piece about how fame is not fair.

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury from the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the fame of “ace” pilots who fought for Germany during the World War I by comparing the number of web pages that now mention each pilot with the number of planes that the pilot shot down.

They discovered that rather than being directly proportional, the fame of the pilots actually increases exponentially with the number of planes they shot down. This means that fame is not distributed fairly among the 393 pilots in the sample.

I’ve had a couple of long conversations with a friend (who’s yet another new scientist reader) about this and she was getting riled about the unfair nature of this. These power law things are part of human nature, and even more fundamentally part of very basic natural science.

The Global Rich List makes one take pause for thought. It reminds me of when I was in Cambodia and talking to some of the Moto drivers there. One of the guys I talked to was saving up to get married and maybe take the one trip of his life across the border to Viet Nam. Things like that put one’s life in perspective, and make you feel lucky that you have the benefits of a life in the culture and time you are in.

Maybe Poke’s site is not entirely accurate but it really hammers home the reality of our status in the west.

Do we consume less now and use more? Is the change to more complex and less linear forms of media mean we are now users and not consumers.

I wouldn’t go as far to say that we are all active users of new interactive media and not reactive consumers of linear media. I think there are modes of use which are quite passive. When I play most games I am doing them in a fairly passive way even though I am involved in the game play and making decisions. When I browse a web site I am not always task focused

Do we have the mental capacity to survive the onslaught of interactivity when all we want to do is sit back and passively consume media?

Spurred on by the movie of the same name (which by all accounts is crap and I have no intention of seeing) I typed fear.com into my browsers URL bar and curiously waited to see what would happen. The results were a lot more interesting than I expected. Fear.com is almost an amihotornot for neurosis, a collaborative fear polling site. Go there and see what people are afraid of and you can also take part… make a difference by sending in your own personal paranoias and agree with particularly common collective fears.

The BBC reports on the new Alliance for Digital Progress. A lobby group to fight stupidity in the US congress, to fight the strangle hold of old grey-haired business on the media industries. They want to promote innovation, which the likes of Disney, BMG, etc are so clearly trying to beat into submission.

And on the same note an article on wired about the Civil War in Sony, between their entertainment and electronics division. One being very US and committed to making a profit at the expense of all around, and one being very Japanese and having a 50 year legacy of innovation and market dominance.

Perhaps Sony will kick off the stagnation their entertainment/media division is helping to perpetuate and kick the new digital media industry into full gear.

Go Sony… You can do it!!

I can’t believe that I’ve never been here before. I’ve just never typed in two of my favourite words into the browser URL bar… Giant Robot. Instead had to find out from William Gibson’s blog. I’m tempted. Monthly noodle reviews and japanese candy articles.

Drifting back to my musings on the future of brands…. Here’s a white paper put together by a bunch of experience designers at some conference of their’s in the states. summary on an attendee’s blog and the PDF whitepaper itself. Haven’t read it fully yet, but a quick skim through shows that it’s not marketing wank and that it is some reasonably thought out scenario planning.

My rant of a month ago has been sitting at the back of my mind wanting to get back out. But I think I will wait until I did a bit of a site redesign and put in a separate a thought/rant section apart from my MLP. It’s confusing enough for me let alone anyone who wants to read this.

I will have to do a whole bunch of looking into this first before ranting again. There are a whole lot of people out there who are doing the same thing as me… albeit maybe not as far into the future as I tend to like to look.

I thought I would get down and formalise some of the thinking about brands that I did while I was in San Fran in Sept and was brought to the surface after a discussion with some colleagues recently. Not sure who else to include in my rant audience, feel free to pass it on.

If you read no further then my summary is that Brand in the future will not be about the usual communication channels.

Brand is a 20th century phenomena. It’s a mass market, mass communication, mass production phenomena. Without these 3 states existing there would be no “brand” as we know it. The reason that Brands have come about is so that products may operate in mass markets, manufactured and delivered by mass production and sold via mass communication.
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