Information Onslaught

Last Tuesday I had a drink over at my neighbor’s house and saw that they had their television set to Obamas State of the Union Address. I offered to come back later or listen to it with them.  We ended up chatting while there was a long segment of congress people and senators walking into the room and greeting each other and by the time I left the President had only just started speaking. I thought to myself, that they should have started the program and timed it to start with the actual address.  

I was little surprised when the next day a poll showed that most viewers didn’t stay on the channel long enough to listen to the speech.  Of course not!  We have 8 (!) seconds (!) in a YouTube video to engage our audience, then they’re gone.  TV shows might get a whopping 90 seconds.  

There are too many things tugging at our sleeve to pay attention to things at length anymore and I’m not talking about children or attention seeking pets and husbands.  When I try to settle into a longer article I actually get a bit jumpy and page to the back to see how long my commitments is going to be and if I want to even start to engage.  Books for fun (and I used to be a voracious reader) have been relegated to the vacation back burner and even then I have to make a time commitment to read a few books.  

The other day I heard an interview on TV (while I was either cooking, exercising or cleaning up social emails) where Tom Brokaw (I think) was talking about a new book and said, that today it’s not enough anymore to read the local newspaper and a few trade magazines and listen to the radio on the way to work and watch the evening news.  We ALSO need to plow through a plethora, or should I say onslaught of information form the net.

I WISH I had time to do all the things Tom Brokaw listed – I’m glad if I manage the New York Times and my Swiss weekly newspaper and the morning news. The blogs I subscribe to get a quick glance and I have an ever growing list of blog entries I have to read, I WANT to red, but oh, so little time. 

We thought reading and writing was dead! Social media has changed that to a certain extent; even if the social media prose is not what we (old people) learned in school. I’m reading a New Yorker article (yes, I know) about the kid that was spied on by his roommate in college and committed suicide after the roommate blasted the internet with the news that he was gay and showed video of him engaging with another man.  The article shows excerpts from the texts that went back and forth between these college freshmen and their friends. I’m reading “IDC”, what?  IDC? I don’t care.  My favorite was that the article was full of “WTF”.  We can now officially use the “F” bomb in a reputable magazine because it’s not spelled out, just WFT.  But, I digress.

So, where does this leave us? In a world where we need to be ever more expert at what we do and retreat into a smaller niches to then find out that we have kinda lost the bigger picture (think onion peel) of your work world, your kids world, your community world, your country world and let’s not forget, art, literature, the latest food fad and the newest technological advances, what your phone can REALLY do and you had no clue?  This morning on the news (NY1):  the app is dwindling.  Today the average user uses less than five apps in a week. They didn’t say how much that’s down from before but my guess is SIGNIFICANTLY.  At some point we have to do the dishes and get some work done. 

I circle back to an earlier post on: Curation and the Human Algorithm. I think curation of information will become ever more important to help us manage knowledge without going under in a sea of distractions and inert information. 

How do YOU manage your information flow?  How have your habits change since the first onslaught of social media and blogging?  Are you digging out from under?

Taking off the Gloves

I’ve been writing for my blog over a year now – my audience, I imagine are a few friends and people who happen across my blog on the website to my documentary film Abraham’s Children. I’ve been keeping the blog on topic mostly writing about experiences in the independent documentary world and about Muslims in America and “Fear of the Other” – topics that interest me deeply and that I’m learning about as I go.

Each time I write I wonder how the reader will respond and how much of my personal self I should or should not reveal and how much of what I write is properly researched. “Properly” researched? I’m not writing for The New Yorker, it’s my blog with my name on it and it’s my opinion. Still, I’m not espousing my opinion as much as I carefully (more or less) write AN opinion slanted towards MY opinion.

I am part of a group of people who will – soon – publish blog entries about the future of the film business. It’s actually about a heck more: Quo Vadis: staying ahead of hindsight; our mission: Quo Vadis thinks ahead by asking the right questions about creation, distribution and monetization of media. Our members come from across the creative and professional spectrum. We think, we explore, we blog and we meet.

The questions we ask, other than the obvious: where are we headed? How do we stay ahead of the curve? How does content evolve on the internet? How do we monetize the internet? Where are the lines drawn between consumers, content providers, creators, producer, distributors and advertisers? Is there a need to draw those lines? What happens to copyright, licensing fees and royalties?

Why am I part of this group? Because I can. Because the paradigm shift we have seen in our business in the past 15 years is great and leaves some of us – me – with the uneasy feeling of a middle aged person about to miss the connecting train. The train of course, has left the station a long time ago – and I would like to think I’m on board – for now in the freight haul – I’d like to make it to 1st class – no, correction, I’d like to make it to the conductor’s cabin. And I know I can. Quo Vadis is one of many ways to get there with the help of my friends.

I’m not a natural writer – I’m a hands-on production person with an opinion. It’s my opinion – not researched, but lived. And it is that opinion I will have to learn to put forward. The gloves have to come off.

They will and this blog will be my exercise for the next few months until we go ‘live’. I want to know: how much do you hold back, research, evaluate and weigh your voice before YOU publish your blog entries?

The Future of Storytelling

Chris Brogan’s series of posts on the future of media, work, marketplaces and community got me thinking about the future of storytelling. Something we are thinking about a lot in the Quo Vadis Think Tank (more on that later).

The future of storytelling is non-linear (sadly, as far as I’m concerned), media centric and for that reason flexible, I would venture to guess also more fragmented and modular. Storytelling will be increasingly interactive, in cases even crowd-sourced, free and digital. Copyright will get a run for its money and need to reinvent itself… I also think the message of the story will become more important.

The message has always been the core for documentaries; and maybe I’m co-mingling message with truth. As documentaries will have to adapt to non-linear, media centric, flexible, interactive and free – how does that change the story? Is the story the message and the medium?

Which brings us to Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message”. McLuhan says that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the medium by which people communicate than by the content of the communication. To which I would add: there are about three (maybe five, ok, no more than ten) original plot lines in the world, any other narrative is a derivative or embellishment thereof.

Where IS the message today? Where IS the story? What story does the medium itself give us and how will it shape us into the future? How will Romeo and Juliet, Pygmalion and the Iliad come to us? IS the internet the medium or the meta-medium ultimately?

The Future of Media

Chris Brogan posted a thoughtful and thought provoking post today:  Make sure to read the comments too.

A few thoughts in random order:

I agree with Chris a 100% on "first" and "full" news, there will be no doubt a lot more immediate news that will hit us as soon as it happens. As I don't think that most consumers will have the time, ability or inclination to verify validity of news, curation will be paramount. There is more raw data (see Wikileaks), but there is also much more possibility for misinformation.

And yes, content will be serial, shorter, interactive, on more touch points (venues), linked (data rich), mobile, and subscriber based.

Two things Chris does not address here are, first the unwillingness of the general heavy-internet users (younger generation) to pay for any content. So with the entire talk about monetization on the internet is a big question mark and a huge one not to be dismissed. I'd love to hear any thoughts about that.

And secondly, we assume that we all have access to the internet 24/7 and at broadband speed. There are entire sections of this country that have NO internet access and rely on dial-up phone lines. This creates a very dangerous vacuum. As we move more and more into a virtual world - the knowledge gap (i.e. socio-economic gab) will widen exponentially.

What is your take on this?