Happy Birthday America

This is my first Independence Day as an American citizen. I have lived half my life in Switzerland and the other half in the US, or more precisely in New York, which by all accounts is not like the rest of the country. At my swearing-in ceremony a few months back quite a few people asked me how I felt as an American: I feel like a New Yorker and always have. Being an American is something I have to get used to.

New York was love at first sight. As any true love we’ve had quarrels, made up and deepened our relationship. 9/11 wounded New York deeply but also sealed my commitment to this city as a place to thrive, live, learn and love. I love New York for its energy, its grit, its people. New York passes no judgment. All nations, colors, levels of madness, cultures, religions, fads and neuroses live here in an unbelievable hodge-podge. Everybody is ‘other’. Every ‘other’ is the ‘normal’. What is there not to love?

Now that I’ve officially upgraded from New Yorker to American I can vote, I moved from “you” to “we”. I’m not an outsider looking in, commenting, I’m now on the inside and I can say “we” when I have an opinion. I can also apply for grants I previously did not qualify for… Most likely I will be called for jury duty the moment I register to vote.

Happy Birthday, America. My wish for you is to leave your teenage years behind and grow up to be a fiscally and politically responsible country, one that values educating future generations and goes out into the world to be a nurturer and not an oppressor. I’ll be watching closely and participating in my civic duties.

Doing Business in the US

On my last blog I ended with the quote: “He/she who makes the most noise will be heard”. This was in relationship to the future of Social Media and the onslaught of information that is coming at us and the need for filtering and curation. Interestingly enough this is also a quote I use each time I make a presentation about how to do business in the US or how to do business as an American in Switzerland. My clients are either Swiss (throw in a few Canadians) who relocate to the US or Americans who move to Switzerland.

One of the few big differences in doing and surviving, business in the US is that you need to speak up – never assume that your actions or accomplishments will speak for themselves – if you don’t make sure all know of them you run the very real risk that someone else will take credit for it.

This goes for meetings and team work as well. Whereas Swiss people will search consensus and a happy medium, Americans will look to choose a leader who will give directives. With all of this there are of course many subtleties and nuances, but the bottom line is: you need to be heard and rise above the fray if you want to succeed in the States. In Switzerland you want to reach a consensus that all can agree on and move forward from there, decisions are taken by a show of hands, the majority rules.

Curation, the Human Algorithm & the Future of Social Media

There are two expressions I keep coming across in reading about the future of everything that’s web-based and, social media in particular: “content curation” and the “human algorithm”.

The definition of curation is that it’s the caretaking or presentation of things entered into a collection, either physical or digital. With the onslaught of information from all sides, some sort of curation needs to be implemented to collect, filter, verify and disseminate news, entertainment, human interaction in the broadest sense.

An Algorithm, according to Wikipedia is an effective method expressed in mathematics and computer science as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. (Gosh I don’t miss math classes). Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing and automated reasoning. So in a way, an algorithm is the mathematical brother of more artsy curation.

So where does curation and the human algorithm come to play? Where curation means that people manually verify and decide what content to present regardless of the readers on-line behavior, the human algorithm is a program fed by ‘trust agents’ to get you real-time information you’re looking for based on your previous on-line behavior and searches. The human comes as much from your behavior as it does from the behaviors of millions of other on-line users that share some of your on-line habits. However the above mentioned ‘trust agents’ are key.

In curating or in programming the challenge lies to find trustworthy sources and networks of followers with ‘good reputations’. Tweets and social content needs to be tied to networks of so-called trust agents and their sub group of followers. Connectivity – being linked to and linking – is the most important thing to attain trustworthy status.

Somebody with a whole lot of followers on Twitter who has a lot of “links” and “recommendations” will, in a Google search on that person, come up over another person with similar content but lesser reputation and trust. This kind of ranking is referred to as the “human algorithm” – I’m oversimplifying this.

You might want to read the following: Brian Solis on “The Human Algorithm and how Google ranks Tweets in real-time Search”, Mark Little of Storyful: “The Human Algorithm”, which really talks about curation and Mathew Ingram of Gigaom writing about the ”Future of Media: Curation, Verification and News as a Process”. The last two articles are bit redundant, but both talk extensively about the verification process of actual news stories, which is fascinating and labor intensive.

And to round it up: Soren Gordhamer from Mashable talks about the Future of Social Media and the three pressing questions regarding the future of social media: distraction, filter, and capacity.

The first is self-explanatory and so is the third, but I would like to expand on the second a bit, filter: increasingly search engines give us information they THINK we want to see. If you where to Google your neighbor from your home computer and then again from a coffee shop you could quite likely get entirely different results. Google, Bing and other search engines are filtering the search for you based on your browsing history, social media interactions and on-line purchasing habits. This brings Gordhamer to ask for three options: filtering needs to be transparent, we need to be able to make choices in the filtering applied and there needs to also be an unfiltered option.

Gordhamer’s observation is; as we will be increasingly inundated, overwhelmed and clogged up with irrelevant and relevant information with still only 24 hours a day. The new paradigm is no longer the questions of the many different ways of sharing on line, but the question of RELEVANCY.

And with relevancy being the new paradigm shift in the near future of social media we are back to curation and human algorithms. He/she who makes the most noise will be heard! What else is new?

Film Production across a Cultural Spectrum

In May I visited a few production companies in Zurich to rekindle old and start new relationships for Clock Wise Productions. One vignette stands out.

I introduced myself to a commercial production house and sat in the ample kitchen conference table while the Swiss producer smoked and I was wondering if I could open a window without being rude. As I was contemplating that idea, the producer tells a story about shooting a TV commercial in the US, somewhere in the “booneys”.

“A US producer shows up with a little carry-on luggage on wheels containing a laptop, printer and surge protector. She sets everything up in the middle of a wheat field. Every time the client asks for a change or an addition she creates a document, hits print and gives the client that page to sign.” Everybody in the room is in stitches laughing.

I’m sitting there thinking: and, what’s the point of the story? The producer is printing out overage forms; that’s a producer’s job. Are they laughing at the portable office set up or at the fact that US producers make clients sign overage forms for major changes?

I tell the Swiss producer that that would be how I would show up on any set and that that would be expected by my US clients. He takes a pause and nods. Not sure what goes through his head at this point, but if I’d have to guess I’d say: “she’s been in America too long.”

We just do business a bit differently here – and what strikes me as funny is, that Americans are much more organized, paper heavy, to the book than Swiss productions are. You would think the reverse to be true. However, and this is the clincher: you ask a Swiss crew person to do something you walk away and never check in again – you assume it will be done. If an American producer would do that they would be considered reckless. We check, double check, we cross our “t’s” and dot our “i’s” and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. And that’s how I like it frankly.

As a producer I have the word “control freak” written across my forehead (there are less flattering words too) and I’m proud of it. Control freak means, I’m responsible for every detail and I can check in, follow up and go through worst case scenarios until I’m blue in the face and no one thinks I’m nuts. So yes, I’ve been in America too long and that’s because it suits me just fine here.

Culture Identity

As a transplant from Switzerland to the US I have spent half of my life on each continent. When I moved to the US in 1989, I would never have considered myself European: I was Swiss. I had not learned to grow my identity beyond my horizons, which were squarely in Switzerland. When the first person in New York asked me if I was European I actually said ‘no’ as a first impulse. I had to learn to see myself as European… and as white, and so on. It was a transforming and liberating experience.

Not only does learning a new culture give you insight into more ‘truths’ you also learn so much about yourself. About how you see yourself and how the outside world sees you. Most importantly I think you learn to not take yourself for granted – or: you learn not to take yourself too seriously. It’s a great exercise in humility.

Learning a Culture

‘Culture Learning’ is a topic that will hold my interest endlessly; not only because linguistics and how we communicate fascinate me, but also because I am a cultural transplant myself. When I talk about culture I mean language, conventions, traditions and rituals, as well as the sub textual behaviors of a civilization: communication in its broadest sense.

The popular philosopher and critical theorist Slavoy Zizek talks about how we are embedded in ideology and defines identity as follows: “Identity lives in the space between invention and reality.” (Slavoy Zizek, “How are we Embedded in Ideology”, Prague 2007).

What is reality, or said differently, what is truth? Truth is the sum of a society’s conventions. There are rules and meta-rules, which are unknown knowns, call them habits or unspoken conventions that set the parameters for moving flawlessly through a society. It is a social network of implicit rules that tell you how to deal with the explicit rules.

Immigrants come into a new set of rules that are the makeup of their host society. Some rules are obvious, some are not. Assimilation and integration starts with learning of the explicit rules. But the meta-rules or implicit rules we only learn over time by trial and error, by using our intuition and assessing situations and reactions to us.

When too many people do not know the implicit rules of a society, the context for these rules weakens. Once the rules lose their context, they collapse. That is what ‘fear of the Other’ really is – a fear of losing one’s own truth.

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?