Jeteye :: social computing

Dr. Media says, watch this space, the world in 2010 in which the number of Asians on line is more than US and Europe combined, will create emergent behavior and markets , we cannot yet envision, cool!

forrester report

Social Trends Fuel Technology’s Changing Role
Concurrent with key technologies hitting stride with the mainstream population, important social
changes also are adding fuel to the fire of the Social Computing movement.
· An aging, more socially motivated population. As people age, their primary motivation
for using technology is driven more by family and social factors, and less by entertainment
and career objectives — both in the US and Western Europe (see Figure 3-1). This social
use of technology will only rise further as the population ages.5 In addition, Forrester has
seen a fundamental shift in the elevation of family and entertainment motivations as they
relate to technology use in the US after 2001 (see Figure 3-2). Whether this trend is due to
the disillusion of a bursting Internet bubble or a stronger sense of community following the
9/11 attacks, the shift is clear: more people are looking to technology for social purposes. The
growth in photo sharing and various forms of messaging — IM, MMS, SMS — illustrates this
trend.
· Internalization of technology among youth. For today’s youth, technology is not a nice-to-
have — it’s a part of life. Twelve- to 17-year-olds in the US spend 17% more time online than
adults for personal reasons and 155% more time instant messaging.6 And each year technology
penetrates younger age groups: 58% of 12- to 14-year-olds, for example, own a mobile phone.7
As these people age, their always-connected behavior will remain with them. Multitasking,
instant messaging, multiple email addresses, and thousand-member networks will be the norm
— even as these youth settle down, have families, and pursue careers.
· A globally defined society. Budweiser’s “Wassup” screensaver reached millions of PCs across
the globe in less than a week — and so did the ILOVEYOU virus. As more individuals come
online — by 2010, there will be more Asians with a PC than North Americans and Europeans
with a PC combined — and as more sites attract a worldwide audience, global networks will
be common.8 Witness Jainworld.com, a site for an India-based religion, which gets 62,000 hits
per day from 143 countries, or Google, which draws over 50% of its audience from outside the
US.

web won't kill tv

Dr.Media says look here, guess TV ain't dead after all. Of course not , now all TV will be available on demand, 24/7. The demand for creative programming will be even greater a growth industry for content providers.



New report counters: 'web won't kill TV'

BANFF/NEXTMEDIA NEWS: A new report that challenges industry perceptions about the realities of the Web v traditional TV models is gunning to stir up debate among delegates attending this year’s annual industry confab in the Canadian Rockies.

The Banff World Television Festival has released a Green Paper report to facilitate discussion at the Wednesday, June 14 Town Hall session it has planned to address the future of Canadian television.

The report, appropriately entitled The Future of Television was published by the Nordicity Group, and says that broadband entertainment won’t have as large an impact on traditional TV models as the media hype has many believing.

It posits that distribution of TV on the Web won’t trump cable and satellite any time soon, because the tremendous costs of bandwidth associated with streamed and downloadable Internet video and particularly high-definition (HD) formats, will hamper growth of the medium.

Meanwhile, television distribution by satellite, cable, fixed wireless, and wireline (through IPTV) is quite efficient, says the report, and thus will remain the dominant distribution system for TV content.

The report also says that while video on the web can reach niche groups more effectively than broadcast television, the numbers of people that can be reached with a single message are still dwarfed by the reach of linear TV.

This is all contradictory to other much-quoted research on the subject. It directly contradicts a study released by IBM this winter entitled 'The end of television as we know it,' which predicted that broadband entertainment would cripple traditional TV broadcasting in short order.

'We accept that on-demand television is threatening the linear model – crudely through time-shifting, and more directly through PVRs, DVDs, VOD, and IP-based streaming and downloading options. But we argue that the end of linear television is hardly nigh,' says the report, noting that new delivery platforms do not in fact signal a 'death knell' for television.

“On-demand television will not destroy linear TV, but broadcasters will need to adjust. While consumers will get ultimate control of when and how they watch, the linear model will still remain – to break the ‘hits’ as well as to provide the lean-back big-screen experience which will never lose appeal,” says the report.


12 Jun 2006
© C21 Media 2006

'Snakes on a Plane' blog buzz forces Hollywood into overdue attitude adjustment

Dr. Media says, the future is here, and now come the shills modeling the myspace, facebook, language to pump noise into the system, lets see how well the age cohort that this is aimed at, 12-24, can seperate the real from the BS, my money is on the kids. AND, companies that get caught doing it will be punished, think,"swiftboated", and you know what happened to him.





' 'Snakes on a Plane' blog buzz forces Hollywood into overdue attitude adjustment
- Neva Chonin, Chronicle Critic at Large
Monday, June 12, 2006

That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane..." -- R.E.M., "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)"

Look, out in the Internet: It's a meme! It's a movie! It's "Snakes on a Plane," the B-movie that just might transcend its low-budget roots to become the most influential film of the year. Not because of its plot (about, er, snakes on a plane) or its star (the uber-cool Samuel Jackson), but because of the impact it's having in the off-screen, online world.

"Snakes on a Plane" (SoaP for short) won't be released until August. But it's already generated an Internet buzz heard around the world -- a buzz so loud it might signal a seismic shift in the relationship between merchandisers and consumers. SoaP is currently exhibit A in the chaotic debate over viral marketing, an advertising approach that, when it works, publicizes a product contagiously through word of mouth. One might even say that SoaP has started a revolution -- quick, tell a friend!

Not since 1999's "Blair Witch Project" has a film spawned so much free, grassroots enthusiasm among a youthful demographic studios usually spend millions courting. What's more, "Snakes on a Plane" achieved its cult status while still in production, thanks to a title absurd enough to spawn fan sites, homemade T-shirts, and a host of faux movie posters and trailers on communities like YouTube.com. When its studio, New Line Cinema, contemplated changing the film's name to the generic "Pacific Air Flight 121," it discovered that "Snakes on a Plane" had grown popular enough to enter online parlance as another way of saying "s -- happens." New Line wisely decided to leave the title alone, and went on to embrace SoaP's fan base by adding five extra days of shooting to amp up the film's over-the-top elements and, per fan requests, letting Jackson deliver a line about "m -- snakes on the m -- plane."

Will others try to replicate this formula? Count on it -- but don't count on their succeeding. Viral marketing relies on creating memes -- cultural ideas that replicate and spread like viruses -- and online memes are inherently anarchic and prone to mutation.

For example, a publicist would have had to be clairvoyant -- and more than a little twisted -- to have predicted the explosion of "Brokeback Mountain" parodies swamping the Internet with the release of the film's misleadingly sappy trailer. And like the "Brokeback" parodies, the "Snakes on a Plane" frenzy is purely a consumer-generated phenomenon. William Gibson, whose 2003 book "Pattern Recognition" explored the world of viral marketing, thinks the spontaneity of an Internet meme makes it hard to manufacture. "The power of 'Snakes on a Plane' is that it emerged from someone having the strength to let go," he says. "The producers of the thing let go of the creative reins when they saw that the blogosphere had taken it over and was telling the story differently. That upped the ante, and it started feeding on itself. You can't create that in-house. You have to be willing to put it out there and let it capture people's imagination."

If marketers want to catch an Internet audience, they'll have to move quickly. Memes travel at hyper speed. On YouTube, MySpace and trend-spotting blogs, anyone with rudimentary photo-manipulation skills can churn out a film parody in an afternoon. A day later, that parody can replicate worldwide, only to be forgotten in 48 hours, when the next meme du jour catches the public interest.

As attention spans decrease and grassroots creativity grows, the power balance between buyer and seller has started to shift: Online customers aren't content to consume a product -- they chew it up and spit it out as something new.

Entertainment corporations are now thinking twice about sending cease-and-desist orders to fans who celebrate and publicize products through appropriation (also known as copyright infringement).

Increasingly, TV producers monitor their programs' online communities and even give onscreen shout-outs to ardent fans, whether its playing up a lesbian subtext in "Xena, Warrior Princess" and "Law and Order: SVU" or launching an Internet alternative-reality game a la "Lost."

And with reality shows like "American Idol" and "Big Brother," consumers are the ones determining outcomes." The era of 'cease-and-desist' is over," says Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Producers are courting fans and catering to their expectations. They're ready to serve that buzz. There's a back-and-forth discussion taking place, and 'Snakes on a Plane' is a fantastic example of this dialogic relationship." Jenkins' latest book, due in August (about the same time SoaP hits theaters) is called "Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide." He also heads MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium, which consults with media companies on how to engage online fan communities. "Media are rewiring their relationship to their consumers," he says. "They should stop worrying about losing control; they lost control a long time ago," he says. "They have to be more approachable and less prohibitory."

They also have to learn that what works as a print or TV ad won't always fly online.

"The instincts that you need to make a commercial movie -- a popcorn movie that appeals to the largest number of people -- are the opposite of the instincts you need to make a viral movie," says Seth Godin, author of "Unleashing the Idea Virus." But, he adds, "the paradox isn't permanent. You can hire a blogger to start these things for you. It's not as good as the real thing, but that doesn't matter. These marketers are selfish liars. They're willing to ruin something in order to sell it."

Nonetheless, some Internet aficionados such as Gibson remain optimistic in the face of corporate perfidy. "I'm not worried about people cracking the code and using it to sell adult diapers or CDs," he says. "Memes are a collaborative thing. I think it would be difficult to fake or synthesize one of those. The viral stuff that works seems to be natural. Besides, there's more prestige in detecting and killing a synthetic meme than in spreading it."

The SoaP meme began, as most great things do these days, with an individual blog entry. Screenwriter Josh Friedman recounted his adventures with doctoring a script for a movie about -- why not? -- snakes. Snakes on a plane. Snakes on a plane with Samuel Jackson. Could it get better? It could not, reasoned SoaP fanatic Brian Finklestein, a law student at Georgetown University who started SnakesonaBlog.com last year as part of his quest to be invited to the movie's world premiere. His blog has since morphed into SoaP central, gathering news, rumors and the latest spasms of SoaP-inspired creativity.

While appreciating his efforts, New Line has kept its corporate hands to itself. "They're excited about what's going on online, but they realize if they get involved directly, the organic, spontaneous feel will be gone," Finklestein says. "A lot of what's fun about this is that people are doing everything on their own. If the studio became involved, it would lose whatever charm and cache it has. I've gotten phone calls from marketers asking what they can do to make this work for them. The answer is that there's not much you can do -- except not sue your audience. The music industry can learn from this."

Maybe it will. "We're in a transition period where everyone agrees that media is becoming more participatory, but the conditions of the participation are under debate," Jenkins says. "Right now, the culture is being shaped by top-down decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up decisions made in teens' bedrooms. It's the intersection of those two forces that will determine the future of media."

And what of "Snakes on a Plane," the latest and greatest example of participatory media, the movie that launched a thousand memes? "All I hope," Gibson says, "is that it's as delightfully, sublimely bad as we dream it'll be."

---

Snakes on the Net

Screenwriter Josh Friedman's blog, where it all began (see Aug. 25, 2005 entry): hucksblog.blogspot.com

The official Snakes on a Plane site: www.snakesonaplane.com

Snakes on a Blog: http://snakesonablog.com

Snakes on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_on_a_plane

Snakes on a Plane, defined: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snakes+on+a+plane

Samuel Jackson talks about Snakes on a Plane: www.collider.com/entertainment/news/archive_detail.asp?aid=599&tcid=1

Snakes on a Plane song contest: www.tagworld.com/snakesonaplane

Fan-made Snakes on a Plane music video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CdSUrtFdXUQ&search=funny%20music%20u2%20soap%20sam%20jackson

A fine assortment of fan-made Snakes on a Plane trailers: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSudn9n0d_k

Snakes on a Plane quote-tracker: snakesonaplane.ning.com/index.php

Fark.com's Snakes on a Plane movie poster contest: forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1949081&thread_type=voteresults

Snakes on a Jefferson Airplane: http://myspace.com/snakesonajeffersonairplane

Wired 14.06: The New Hollywood

This goes along with the Murdoch My Space article, TV not dead, only bigger, Hollywood reborn--again.



Wired 14.06: The New Hollywood: "The New Hollywood
Jeff Skoll, Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney, and Mark Cuban
They’re an unlikely gang of rebels: a couple of dotcom billionaires, an Oscar-winning director, and the sexiest man alive. But if you’re going to take on Hollywood – transform it from the inside – that’s the kind of clout you need. Jeff Skoll, Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney, and Mark Cuban are breaking the studio system of its bigger-is-better mindset and showing that risk-taking message movies can compete with popcorn blockbusters at the box office. By using new ideas and technologies – broadband distribution, 4K digital projectors, and simultaneous multiplatform releases – they’re building a new economic model for Tinseltown. Cue the music: The castle walls are coming down.

Jeff Skoll

The Role: Founding Participant Productions, a film company with a “double bottom line,” Skoll says. “Profits and social good.”
The Drama: Skoll’s eBay billions fund movies that take a stand against global warming (An Inconvenient Truth), delve into the sticky relationship between politics and the oil trade (Syriana), and expose scaremongering (Good Night, and Good Luck).
The Sequel: Director Richard Linklater’s take on Fast Food Nation, the best-selling diatribe on the American diet.

Steven Soderbergh

The Role: Using his fame as a director (Erin Brockovich, Traffic) to make movies that land simultaneously in theaters, on DVD, and on hi-def cable networks.
The Drama: Bubble, Soderbergh’s first multiplatform film, died at the box office. But as a proof of concept, it captured national attention.
The Sequel: Five more simultaneous releases, showing Hollywood how to join the broadband revolution.

George Clooney

The Role: Leveraging his charm, experience, and personal fortune to get the green light for politically engaged movies. The former TV star is well versed in studio economics, but he’ll work for scale on a project that challenges conventions. He even offered to put up his house to finance Good Night, and Good Luck, the story of how newsman Edward R. Murrow took on red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy.
The Drama: : In Syriana and Good Night, Clooney dialed back the pretty-boy smile but still emerged as a sex symbol for the new independent film movement – paunch, beard, glasses, and all.
The Sequel: Exposing the ethical transgressions of corporate litigators at a top New York law firm in Michael Clayton.

Mark Cuban

The Role: Producing pictures “that make people think” (HDNet Films, 2929 Entertainment), distributing them (Magnolia Pictures, HDNet Movies), and exhibiting them in what will be the world’s first all-digital theater chain (Landmark Theatres). Oh, and freeing all of his films’ DVDs from copy protections.
The Drama: He’s rich, he’s brash – and he just might be right.
The Sequel: Providing an audio feed to every theater seat, so viewers can listen to films in different languages.

Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules - New York Times

June 5, 2006

Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry's Rules

By MOTOKO RICH

When Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, "Only Revolutions," is published in September, it will include hundreds of margin notes listing moments in history suggested online by fans of his work. Nearly 60 of his contributors have already received galleys of the experimental book, which they're commenting about in a private forum at Mr. Danielewski's Web site, www.onlyrevolutions.com.

Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new book "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom" (Yale University Press), has gone even farther: his entire book is available — free — as a download from his Web site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically, with some of them adding comments and links to the online version.

Mr. Benkler said he saw the project as "simply an experiment of how books might be in the future." That is one of the hottest debates in the book world right now, as publishers, editors and writers grapple with the Web's ability to connect readers and writers more quickly and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books electronically and the advent of digital devices that promise to do for books what the iPod has done for music: making them easily downloadable and completely portable.

Not surprisingly, writers have greeted these measures with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. The dread was perhaps most eloquently crystallized last month in Washington at BookExpo, the publishing industry's annual convention, when the novelist John Updike forcefully decried a digital future composed of free downloads of books and the mixing and matching of "snippets" of text, calling it a "grisly scenario."

Hovering above the discussion of all these technologies is the fear that the publishing industry could be subject to the same upheaval that has plagued the music industry, where digitalization has started to displace the traditional artistic and economic model of the record album with 99-cent song downloads and personalized playlists. Total album sales are down 19 percent since 2001, while CD sales have dropped 16 percent during the same period, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Sales of single digital music tracks have jumped more than 1,700 percent in just two years.

What writers think about technological developments in the literary world has a lot to do with where they are sitting at the moment. As a researcher and scholar, Anne Fadiman, author of "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" and "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," thinks a digital library of all books would be a "godsend" during research, allowing her to "sniff out all the paragraphs" on a given topic. But, she said: "That's not reading. For reading, you have to read a book in its entirety and I think there's no substitute for the look and feel and smell of a real book — the magic of the paper and thread and glue."

Others have a much less fixed notion of books. Lisa Scottoline, the author of 13 thrillers, the most recent of which, "Dirty Blonde," spent four weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this spring, offers the first chapter or two of each book on her Web site; and her publisher, HarperCollins, hands out "samplers" of a few chapters of her titles in bookstores. Any of these formats are fine with her, she says. Whether its "paper, pulp, gold rimmed or digitized, I don't think you can take away from the best stories," she said.

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. "Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together," wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. "The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book."

"Does that mean 'Anna Karenina' goes hand in hand with my niece's blog of her trip to Las Vegas?" asked Jane Hamilton, author of "The Book of Ruth" and a forthcoming novel, "When Madeline Was Young." "It sounds absolutely deadly." Reading books as isolated works is precisely what she wants to do, she said. "When I read someone like Willa Cather, I feel like I'm in the presence of the divine," Ms. Hamilton said. "I don't want her mixed up with anybody else. And I certainly don't want to go to her Web site."

For unknown authors struggling to capture the attention of busy readers, however, the Web offers an unprecedented way to catapult out of obscurity. Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer who started a political blog, "Unclaimed Territory," just eight months ago, was recruited by a foundation financed by Working Assets, a credit card issuer and telecommunications company, to write a book this spring. Mr. Greenwald promoted the result, called "How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," on his own blog and his publisher e-mailed digital galleys to seven other influential bloggers, who helped to send it to the No. 1 spot on Amazon.com before it was even published. This Sunday it will hit No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction paperback best-seller list. "I think people who are sort of on the outside of the institutions and new voices entering will be a lot more excited about this technology," Mr. Greenwald said. "That's one of the effects that technology always has. It democratizes things and brings in new readers and new authors."

For many authors, the question of how technology will shape book publishing inevitably leads to the question of how writers will be paid. Currently, publishers pay authors an advance against royalties, which are conventionally earned at the rate of 15 percent of the cover price of each copy sold.

But the Internet makes it a lot easier to spread work free. "I've had pieces put up on Web sites legally and otherwise that get hundreds of thousands of hits, and believe me I sit around thinking 'Boy, if I got a dollar every time that somebody posted an op-ed that I wrote, I'd be a very happy writer,' " said Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the forthcoming book "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," a memoir about his hunt to discover what happened to relatives who were killed in the Holocaust.

Mr. Mendelsohn said he understood that technological shakeups take time to play out, and that he can't bemoan every lost penny. "But as an author who creates texts that people consume, I want my authorship to be recognized and I want to get compensated," he said.

Mr. Benkler, the Yale professor and author, argues that people will continue to pay for books if the price is low enough. "Even in music, price can compete with free," Mr. Benkler said. "The service has to be sufficiently better and the moral culture needs to be one where, as an act of respect, when the price is reasonable, you pay. Its not clear to me why, if people are willing to pay 99 cents for a song they won't be willing to pay $3 for a book."

He argues that without the costs of paper and physical book production, publishers could afford to give authors a higher cut of the sale price as royalties.

In the context of history, the changes that today's technology will impose on literary society may not be as earth-shattering as some may think. In fact, books themselves are a relatively new construct, inheritors of a longstanding oral storytelling culture. Mass-produced books are an even newer phenomenon, enabled by the invention of the printing press that likely put legions of calligraphers and bookbinders out of business.

That history gives great comfort to writers like Vikram Chandra, whose 1,000-page novel, "Sacred Games," will be published in January. Mr. Chandra, a former computer programmer who already reads e-books downloaded to his pocket personal computer, said he saw no point in resisting technology. "I think circling the wagons and defending the fortress metaphors are a little misplaced," he said. "The barbarians at the gate are usually willing to negotiate a little, and the guys in the fort usually end up yelling that 'we are the only good things in the world and you guys don't understand it,' at which point the barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with their amazingly powerful weapons, and put a parking lot over your sacred grounds.

"If they are in a really good mood," he added, "they put up a pyramid of skulls."

Mr. Danielewski said that the physical book would persist as long as authors figure out ways to stretch the format in new ways. "Only Revolutions," he pointed out, tracks the experiences of two intersecting characters, whose narratives begin at different ends of the book, requiring readers to turn it upside down every eight pages to get both of their stories. "As excited as I am by technology, I'm ultimately creating a book that can't exist online," he said. "The experience of starting at either end of the book and feeling the space close between the characters until you're exactly at the halfway point is not something you could experience online. I think that's the bar that the Internet is driving towards: how to further emphasize what is different and exceptional about books."