Posts filed under 'media'
Bits (or bytes) of the future
Tom Ding writes:
You may have noticed that Wired, the ‘magazine about what’s next’, recently re-launched in the UK after a twelve year hiatus. We’ve held off rushing to judgment, but after three issues it’s possible to more reflective.
The editorial from the first (re)- issue explained: ‘Whatever may be happening in today’s economy, the pace of change in business, science and culture is not slowing – which is why, unreconstructed optimists that we are, we believe there’s no better time to launch an exciting, inspiring magazine.’ The time has come, apparently, to ‘Subscribe to the future.’
But of course, Wired is itself a contradiction: everyone knows that there will be no magazines in the future; everything will be digital. Bytes, or bits, will have replaced atoms. As one reader tweeted, Wired is ‘the mag that cuts down trees to write about the paperless office’, and the editors also seem to struggle with an existential tension: in the third issue there are reviews of the latest e-books and a ‘how to’ guide about turning the magazine into a snack bowl or a picture frame.
There are many brands that manage to exploit internal tensions – American Apparel, for example, maintains its cool by combining pioneering ethical production with a reputation for sexual controversy – but instead Wired seems trapped by its own status, by its format. For all its engaging content, the magazine is caught uncomfortably between the lads’ mags and the blogosphere, between the mainstream and the cutting-edge, between the past and the future.
Yet whilst subscribing to Wired may never truly feel like subscribing to the future, it would be a mistake to think the most exciting alternatives are all found behind a screen. Stack is a new service that delivers a different independent magazine each month to its online subscribers (shades here of Rough Trade’s music subscription service), and Russell Davies (who also writes for Wired) recently helped print a ground-breaking newspaper called ‘Things our friends have written on the internet’. Perhaps the key for true magazines of the future will be to embrace the tension between paper and screen, and make more of the benefits of both.
The picture at the top is borrowed, with thanks, from magculture.
Add comment 6 July 2009
When pigs flu: the social life of pandemics
Alex Steer writes:
The numbers are changing constantly, but at time of writing, somewhere around 1,800 people (over 1,600 in Mexico) have been infected with the new ‘swine flu’ strain, and 103 people have died. The World Health Organization is coordinating the response, calling it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
When reading headlines like these, our thoughts naturally turn to the past and the future: where did this come from, and where will it lead? Our impressions of the past often inform the futures we imagine. We know about the possibilities of pandemic disease, even if few of us have experienced them. In 1919 between 20 and 100 million people worldwide were killed by an influenza pandemic; between 1982 and 2007 more than 2 million died of AIDS.
From flesh-eating viruses to ebola to winter vomiting, we are fascinated by the extremely unpredictable: the small outlying cause that transforms our lives; the sick man on the plane who brings down a city. Modern zombie lore is driven more by our fear of inexplicable pandemic outbreaks than by our belief in voodoo. (If you don’t believe me, watch 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and Dead Set in succession. But don’t do it late at night.)
Pandemics, unlike zombies, have full and active social lives. Even events which seem radically unpredictable have driving forces, many of which don’t need a microscope to be seen. They range from urbanisation to the dense migration networks and transport systems which increase each infectious person’s sphere of influence; from healthcare policies which exclude uninsured low-income workers from care to lumbering organisational structures which make it hard to close roads or supply drugs at short notice. It takes a whole range of forces, not just a few strands of RNA, to make a pandemic.
Our own stories also drive our behaviour. In the hour before this post was written, 24,000 stories containing the word ‘swine flu’ were indexed by Google News. This morning airlines and hotel chains saw steep declines in their share value. Newspapers carried photos of travellers at UK airports wearing masks.
Swine flu may or may not go pandemic, but so far it isn’t even close. Each year 3-4,000 people in the UK die of normal-strain influenza. Our response is out of all proportion to the clinical risk. It reflects our fascination with the pigs-might-fly rareness of new diseases, and our unwillingness to grapple with the other factors that affect how, when, and where people get sick.
The picture of that childhood game of chance, “Pass the Pigs”, was borrowed, with thanks, from Kaptain Kobold on Flickr.
2 comments 28 April 2009
Trusting Twitter
Oliver Wright writes:
The noise of Twitter has reached a crescendo over the past couple of months, partly because of its role in sharing and even breaking news. The fact that it’s been used for this says something about the gaps in conventional forms of media.
One of the first news events that caught the attention of ‘tweeters’ was the earthquake in Sichuan in May last year, where people across China started using various blogging services – including Twitter – to tell friends and family that they were safe. A technology blogger, Robert Scoble, reported news about the earthquake ahead of the US Geological Survey (which tracks earthquakes in real time) simply from tweets he received from his followers in China.
Similarly (but with greater media coverage) with the Mumbai terrorist attacks, where tweeters effectively covered the event live, mashing up news from sources on the ground via tweeters and other agencies as new stories emerged. Doubts about the accuracy of these versions of events eventually led the Mumbai authorities to call for tweeters to stop spreading the news – a call that was, predictably, ignored. The viral nature of the information being spread by Twitter was captured, perhaps chillingly, by one user, “naomieve”, who wrote:
Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.
The ‘social media experiment’ has continued with the Obama inauguration, the Hudson plane crash, and cyclist Lance Armstrong’s stolen bike (found) all receiving much publicity.
It was in the 1960s that the cultural analyst Marshall McLuhan argued that electronic media was a series of extensions to the human body which would create an ‘electronic interdependence’. As James Harkin observed recently in The Times,
The impact of this electronic information loop coursing through all our veins, McLuhan thought, could only enhance our ability to understand one another. It would, he felt sure, precipitate the rise of a “global village” and a new era of greater responsibility and understanding.
Instead, the cost of this electronic interdependence is a media landscape which is more fragmented than ever. Shared social experiences such as these are reduced to cultural nostalgia. But in an age where so much media, and politics, is carefully packaged, what Twitter – and media cousins such as the text message – can do is to reclaim a sense of immediacy, and to increase our sense of shared engagement in the events which are happening around us. Maybe McLuhan will have the last laugh after all.
The graphic is courtesy of Carrot Blog – on the addictive nature of Twitter.
Add comment 4 March 2009
Live and direct
Rebecca Nash writes:
Some anthropologists of religion work with people who seek unmediated contact with their gods. Their ethnographies contrast the experience of word as text (scriptural religions) with the immediate word (through a prophet or visions). Christian apostolics have told one anthropologist, ‘We don’t use the Bible, we receive the Holy Spirit, live and direct’.
Live and direct. Curiously this is the same claim that television news makes every day in the era of cheap satellite links and rolling news, but usually the live connection is to a reporter or an expert giving their mediated view of events, with technology – and graphics – providing a patina of immediacy.
And certainly, during the Obama campaign, there was plenty of mediated coverage, through more channels than ever before. It became too easy, too occupying during the campaign to catch up on events by logging on to YouTube, skimming political blogs, monitoring poll data, reading coverage in magazines and newspapers. All of these channels were harnessed skillfully by Obama – his messages seemed to be everywhere. Alongside this, the media itself played a filtering role, interpreting messages, constructing meaning, and shaping opinion.
But every trend has its counter-trend. The more that’s recorded and interpreted, the more that people want to experience the live event for themselves, without interpretation. I think this desire for an unmediated experience explains in part the huge crowds at the ritual of Tuesday’s inaugural ceremony in Washington, DC.
I left work early myself to see the ceremony ‘live and direct’ (granted, on TV from my couch in London). As an American living in London I knew I wouldn’t have the self-control to watch it later, when the analysis and the commentary would have kicked in. But it was the kind of event where update and analysis were beside the point – the shared live experience, the immediate Word, not the text, was what mattered most.
Add comment 21 January 2009
Credit crunch cliches
Andy Stubbings writes:
One of the great lines in the film Network is when the news anchor Howard Beale covers the news of the 1970s recession by telling viewers,
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad! Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression!”
But in the days of 24-hour rolling news channels and multi-supplement newspapers, such brevity is no longer good enough. There’s a correlation between the amount of actual ‘news’ anyone can report, their level of knowledge of the subject, and the amount of cliche they generate. The formula for this is probably M x I = C, where M is how massive the story is, I is the journalists’ general level of ignorance, and C is the volume of cliche. There are even blogs which celebrate the best crunch cliches. Here’s my list of current favourites.
- Brokers with their hands on their faces. The first and possibly still the best.
- The dramatic falling red line on a graph. It’s like the classic cartoon graph, which plunges off the edge of the chart, and never (well hardly ever) has scales or axes.
- The knock on effect. The human interest story designed to explain economics’ multiplier effect: the local corner shop skimps on window cleaning, so the window cleaners have cut back, so the chammy leather business is struggling, and in no time at all we’re at 3 million unemployed by Christmas.
- The unlikely winners. The little-known (but still beaten-to-death-in-popular-journalism) phenomenon of unlikely goods, usually discretionary luxuries, succeeding in the prevailing economic environment. Examples cited include pizza home delivery, condoms, dining in for a tenner, and even Karl Marx.
- The unfortunate loser. Sometimes seen alongside number 4. This sometimes appears to be the publication’s revenge on things it’s never liked much, from smoothies to BMWs.
- The credit crunch as Malthusian check to greed and selfishness. To achieve full cliche status needs to include the phrase ‘financial wizardry’.
- The undeserving bankers. If they aren’t about to be sacked (see number 1), they will be drinking champagne at an ING-sponsored party on the proceeds of the tax-payers’ bail-out.
- The worst….since the great depression. Or other periods of general purpose crisis, such as the Second World War, Roosevelt’s New Deal, rationing, the Blitz, etc. The Sun is the runaway leader here. Its “Backing British Business” campaign even uses the slogan “Your country needs you“.
- The list (ahem). Usually money saving tips which can be constantly recycled from one story to another.
- ‘The credit crunch’. The biggest cliche of the lot. Used as shorthand for everything, and shoe-horned wherever possible into every other Sunday supplement article e.g. ‘credit crunch chic’, ‘credit crunch lunch’. And now being seen in other company as well – as in “the oil crunch“.
Thanks to Josh Hunt and Joe Ballantyne for their contributions. The picture at the top of this post comes from Brokers With Hands On Their Faces, and there’s a lot more there.
1 comment 20 November 2008
Social networking for fun and profit
Pen Stuart writes:
The irresistible rise of social networking has long had media types trying to calculate the best ways to make some money from them. But marketers are increasingly finding that these routes work best when brands provide a service rather than just push their message, creating what’s become known as ‘branded utility’. There are recent examples. The Beef and Lamb Sector Company, EBLEX Ltd, has launched a Facebook application, “Beefy & Lamby’s Summer BBQ”, featuring – from the TV campaign – the sometime England cricketers Ian Botham and Allan Lamb to help people plan their summer barbeques. Leaving aside the question of whether 50-something cricketers are the best match for the somewhat younger Facebook crowd, it does give users a useful service that encourages consumption of their product and also raises brand awareness, even if it seems to be building its audience slowly (26 visitors on the day this post was written). The apparent selflessness of this service can help build brand loyalty in times when ravenous profiteering is increasingly frowned upon.
MakeTheTea.com, created by Cravendale, takes this one step further, devoting a whole site and social network to their utility. This allows office workers to input their tea (and coffee) preferences and link up with their colleagues. The site randomly selects one person to make the round, overcoming the reluctance of any individual to ask around and get stuck with the task. The site seems to be flourishing, with almost 70,000 brews made since its April launch
But there are still questions about the future of such ventures – they have the feel of short-term awareness campaigns which seem certain to be pulled in due course. Yet for low-maintenance promotion such as this, the best approach may be different, especially as these types of internet communities are endlessly discovered anew by different groups, each time creating waves of publicity through blogging and social network invites. In the world of social networking the fundamental assumptions of ‘offline’ publicity may need an overhaul. Or at least, as marketers like to say, more research may be required.
Add comment 4 July 2008
Buying viewers’ attention
Andrew Curry writes:
The combination of the FA Cup Final – the last for a while on the BBC – and the epically overhyped Champions’ League final on ITV sent me to some recent interesting data (above) from BMRB Sport. They measure both the total interested audience for sport on TV, and also a “passion index” which captures the quality of the audience, assessed by their level of interest in the sport. The passion index seems to me to be a reasonable proxy for ‘attention’ – that increasingly important, but often elusive, quality sought by traditional media owners.
Broadly, the passion index is higher for football, and doesn’t correlate strongly with overall audiences, which leads to the thought that commercial terrestrial broadcasters need both scale and passion to make their rights investment pay off, in terms of advertising and sponsorship revenues, whereas a public service broadcaster can justify its investment by the breadth of the audience. And with next season’s rights to Formula 1 moving to the BBC (ITV couldn’t afford both F1 and the FA Cup), the BBC’s sports properties, if you include the Premiership highlights on Match of the Day, now include five of the top seven sports by breadth of audience, but only one (those Premiership highlights again) by ‘quality’ or interest levels.
And there is some good news for the BBC here. According to BMRB, Formula 1 has climbed steadily in the popularity rankings over the last year, from seventh to fourth, on back of Lewis Hamilton’s successes.
Add comment 23 May 2008
Flying the flag (post 2 of 2)
Jake Goretzki writes:
In the first half of this post, I wrote about flags as brands with an army and navy – but still in need of relaunching or repositioning from time to time. When they do work, relaunches are marvellously transformatory. Imagine Canada with this blazer badge of a flag (below) – unbelievably, this survived until 1965. It seems to convey the notion of Canada as some kind of British backwater. How could it ever have stood out? The Maple leaf on the other hand is ownable, differentiated and unifying. That said, of course, Quebec might beg to differ – anyone for a rebrand?
Canada Pre-1965
Canada Post-1965
Add comment 22 April 2008
But what about Tim?
Holly Moore from Yankelovich writes:
The latest television programming kerfuffle over the U.S. fashion reality TV show Project Runway is telling us something interesting about both the future of the reality genre, and the increasing visibility of life coaching.
For new readers, the kerfuffle goes like this. The producers of Project Runway, now a four seasons-old hit, are trying to move the show from Bravo (the U.S. cable network owned by NBC Universal) to Lifetime Television, a cable network that’s looking to diversify beyond programming that’s often about women in crisis. NBC claims it still has the rights to future seasons, and so, inevitably, is suing the producers.
But viewers are more likely to worry about the future of the person who has become America’s favorite mentor, Tim Gunn. Unlike many reality show stars, Tim’s the compassionate master of constructive criticism and tough love. Gunn is the tutor we all hope to have and the manager all managers should strive to be. (I recall an Echo Boomershow and a big gig as the creative chief at Liz Claiborne. comedian once saying, “I so wish he was my gay dad.”) His popularity and fashion judgment have already earned him his own
We talk a great deal about the importance of coaching in the Yankelovich MONITOR. And in an era in which so many of us under 40 were raised to think that we were unconditionally special, it’s rather remarkable to find a voice who can find the balance between nurturing growth and encouraging exploration while still reinforcing objective standards of excellence.
So while the courts decide where viewers should ultimately tune in, hopefully content creators will notice how quickly Gunn’s brand star rose – and the void he filled in the landscape of back-biting reality programming – to help make Project Runway a TV brand worth fighting for.
(Image from BravoTV.com)
1 comment 17 April 2008
