The Future of Storytelling from a Documentarian’s POV

Chris Brogan’s series of posts on the future of media, work, marketplaces and community got me thinking about the future of storytelling.

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 will need to reinvent itself. Curation of content will take on a big role. 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 further to non-linear, media centric, flexible, interactive and free – how does that change the story? Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message”, 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.

Where IS the message? Where IS the story? What story does the medium itself give us and how will it shape us into the future? How will eternal story lines of Romeo and Juliet, Pygmalion and the Iliad come to us? Is the internet the message or the medium or ultimately the meta-medium. I would suspect all three.

Happy Birthday Switzerland

720 years ago the foundation for Switzerland was laid, when the men of the region of the three original cantons threw out the Habsburgians and formed the Swiss confederacy also known as Confederatio Helvetica.

As much as America is in its adolescence today (see my post of July 4th), Switzerland is an old lady – actually make that a grumpy old man. If there were characteristics to summarily dispense on the Swiss it would be: opinionated – because being neutral does not mean you don’t have a strong stance on issues, traditional and change-adverse, a wee bit stubborn, quiet and modest. We believe our actions will speak for themselves, no need to go shopping with them and no fear that others will if you don’t.

We are of course very punctual (you kind of have to if you sell the watches we do), quality driven, reliable and dependable and yes, to a Swiss person those are two different qualities. I would like to add a great sense for esthetics; maybe that’s why so many Swiss are gifted designers. The Helvetica font was created by a Swiss: Max Miedinger in 1957. It was an instant hit. The documentary Helvetica about the font is very cool.

Happy Birthday Switzerland: I wish that you could loosen up a bit and find a way to combine the old and true with the new and exciting and that you can remember that change can be good! You are the “awesomest” country in the world, but you need to learn to participate in it and accept the change you invite by doing so.

“I don’t have a TV”

I love when people tell me they don’t watch TV, or they don’t have a TV. TV zaps your time like nothing else – well maybe a child (any age) will too, but I always think that people who tell me they don’t own a TV or they don’t watch TV are trying to go the high-brow route of not wasting time with “that stuff”.  For full disclosure: I own a TV and I watch TV.

Here a scientifically insignificant study on “watching TV”:

Case Study #1:

My parents, (in Europe), pay a state mandated TV tax for each TV in the house (two), they have a cable box and have dinner at 6:30 PM so they can watch the 7:30 PM main news segment on public television. The exact same news segment will be shown on an alternate channel at 8 PM, but my father favors the ‘freshness’ of the 7:30 PM news, not to mention that the 8:00 PM news interferes with the movie shown at 8:15 PM. If I call from New York – which I seem to always do during the news – I’m being told to call back – after the movie. The toilet probably flushes at the same time in all of Switzerland during the only commercial break in a 90 minute movie.

Case Study #2:

I have a TV in my living room, a digital cable box with DV-R, a Roku box, and a DVD player. I watch the same four or five shows nearly exclusively because I stopped channel surfing since I have the DV-R. I have no concept of which show runs on which network at what time and what day of the week. I watch TV when I’m done with work, I fast forward through commercials, lest I disappear into the kitchen.

In real time I only watch NY1 while I go through my morning routine which makes me dip in and out of the living room. Occasionally I will sit down for an ‘event’ like the Academy Awards or a Royal Wedding (sorry to say, but I had a visitor who insisted).

Case Study #3:

My co-worker, a 26 years old recent college graduate, doesn’t watch TV – she makes a point out of telling me so. She watches Hulu, YouTube and Netflix – but her laptop is tethered to a digital monitor, the digital monitor is an old TV which stands across the sofa in the living room…. but she does NOT watch TV.

So, we all still watch something, be it life TV or canned goods; we call it ‘watching TV’ or ‘not watching TV’ – does it really matter?

My parents spend 2.5 hours a night between the news and a movie – their TV dictates when they eat and go to the bathroom.

I watch TV when I have “time” – some weeks more, others not at all – the shows are always there on my cable box. I want to believe that I watch more focused, however I do tend to watch ‘one more show’ because it’s there on my cable box and it ONLY runs for 40 minutes if I zap through the commercials.

My co-worker culls her viewing from many different sources and has left the structure of TV viewing behind her entirely.

How have YOUR TV consumption habits changed and how do you think it will affect the future of content production?

The Cyber-Gap

The internet has opened doors to an unimaginable wealth of information, education and commerce opportunities; it has enabled emerging pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Algiers, has empowered dissidents worldwide and is closing geographical and physical gaps around the world.

The Internet is hands-down a great enabler. At the same time the gap between educated and under-educated, poor and rich, rural and urban, empowered and disenfranchised is growing – rapidly.

How are people around the world going to engage when they have no internet access? No access to on-line education, commerce, potential jobs and clients, information, social exchange, passing of ideas, or civic engagement? The more our world moves onto the internet the wider the gap becomes between the haves and have not’s of internet access and economic power.

To this day 70% of the U.S. population visits the public library not only for their reading and research projects, but also for their computer and internet use, according to departing New York Public Library president Paul LeClerc. (NY1 “New York Times close up” edition with Sam Roberts).

Within the thirty-four OECD states the U.S. has fallen from fourth place in 2001 to 15th place in 2006 in broadband penetration. (See graph) . Availability is one reason, pricing another. Where today Ireland and Switzerland are the countries with the best price points in the OECD for adding high speed internet to an existing phone line, the US is in the lower third of that list.

If we want to keep up economically with the rest of the world (Asia foremost and Europe) we have to make sure that all areas of the United States have access to broadband internet; and soon. The lost potential of talent and the education gap are too great to ignore.

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.