The Super-Super Star

From armchair quartebacking to gossiping about celebrities and neighbors alike, the vast majority of people in the world love to talk about other people. It's a way of connecting to something universally shared, and of expressing opinions that can be well thought through, well reasoned, emotionally conceived or even passionately regarded. In any of these cases, the opinion is ultimately empty, because nothing will stop the celebrity from being a celebrity.

Celebrities are our new royalty, a broad swath of Dukes and Duchesses, Earls and Ladies, Princes and Princesses, and Kings and Queens that hold their ceremonial positions at the pleasure of their popularity, and whose influence is as powerless as the opinions that swirl around them.

Perhaps first in line for the Hollywood throne are the power-couple known as Brangelina. Their love affair(s) have captured the hearts and minds of many on the planet, and when word came of Angelina's pregnancy, followed shortly by Jack Black's Twin slip during a junket for Kung-Fu Panda, the world held its breath for the birth of these 'divine' children. And when it came time to sell the rights to the photographs of the royal offspring, an as-yet-unnamed U.S. magazine paid US$11 Million for the privilege of first-run publication.

$11 Million. Let me type that again, numerically this time: $11,000,000.

Is this an egregious sum of money to pay for photographs of two people's newborn twins? Shall we all suck in our breath, aghast at how insane that number is? Not at all.

These magazine publishing guys aren't stupid... If someone has agreed to pay that much money for some baby pictures, you can be damned sure that they're going to make that money back, and then some.

But what does this have to do with a blog on technoculture? A LOT. The pioneers of the early internet long held the belief that the democratizing nature of a virtually free global publishing system was going to fracture our media space so much that anyone with talent and gumption could get their stuff seen by anyone else on the planet. Gone would be the days, they thought, of mega-media empires. The studio system might buckle under its own weight as increased competition for the entertainment mindspace of consumers around the world. Music, movies, news, TV, fiction, commerce, whatever - all would face stiff competition from users all over the world.

While internet video has presented us with a few new 'stars,' they have by and large either been either associated with Hollywood (LonleyGirl15) or about Hollywoord ("Leave her Alone" fanboy Chris Cocker). Moreover, they have largely been popularized through traditional media channels which are, for the most part, controlled by the same folks that control Hollywood.

But with new media continuing to fragment our content consumption into smaller and smaller niches, as McLuhan suggested, how does someone expect to make back their 11 Mill? This speaks to Dr. McLuhan's most famous quote: The medium is the massage. In other words, the same content can be reformatted many times and repurposed into the different niches from the hit-driven popular media, all the way down the long tail.

While many will marvel and gawk at the famous-from-birth twins, and talk about what this will do to Brad & Angela's marriage, some will sneer at the disgusting consumerist nation that gives light to this sort of thing, while still others will create mocking flash videos with the photos.

No matter what point of view each individual takes, they all have one thing in common: They are all essentially still commoners taking interest in their lords, and the aristocracy knows how to play this game.

Oh, But The Home Of The Future Is Sooooo 1939

The future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room the house."

- Popular Mechanics "The Electrice Home of the Future," Aug, 1939

The folks at the Industry Standard have offered up a new predictive look at the home of future, this time projecting ahead to 2013. The "Home Of The Future" is a common thought experiment that allows futurists, engineers, artists and business people to trace a path to the present by looking backwards from the future (hey, that sounds familiar), and the Industry Standard offers an interesting guide.

t's 2013, and you've just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.

Welcome home.

In the following pages, you'll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others -- such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing -- haven't made it into people's homes ... yet.

Check out the full article here

More Brilliantly Halting Prescience...

I was researching something and came across this old interview with Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT (link to her personal site) in support of her 1996 book "Life On The Screen." Some choice tidbits (Dr. Turkle noted where appropriate, otherwise it's the author of the article, Pamela McCorduck):

"Mainframes were modernist, but computing slipped into postmodernism when people got personal computers. Computing continues its postmodern odyssey through the Internet to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae. With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the rules first, its hypertext (no one pathway through the text is the correct way or the best way), computing now is as postmodernist as it gets."

"In terms of technologies that have really changed people's deepest conceptions of self, we've had a long run with print," Turkle says. "Print has been a transparent medium for expressing a unitary self. Our cultural memory really doesn't go back to the time we felt we were inhabited by divinities, so we treat the sense of unitary self we've adapted from print as natural. But we're in the beginning of a profound shake-up of that sense of what a self is and what you take responsibility for and what you don't. Computers are central to this. I'm not saying that other technologies haven't changed us, I'm just saying that when you can embody your ideas in a machine that you can then go up and talk to - this is new. When you can have an instantiation of your body on a computer - this is new."

Read the Full (astonishingly well-written) article Here

Tell Me A Story... And It Better Be A Good One.

h/t to Slashdot for this...

Apparently, there're plans afoot to blend a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with a weekly TV show on the Sci-Fi Network in the US. Most of the reaction in the blogosphere have pointed towards this being ill-advised. I agree, but perhaps for different reasons than "It's gonna suck."

The thinking behind the plan is fairly obvious: Create so-called appointment viewing, or getting fans to watch a show as it's being broadcast, rather than on a DVR such as TiVo or from a Bittorrent, so that viewers must watch the advertisements. The MMORPG has the added benefit of providing engagement and continuity so that the show remains top of mind for the viewer base, and they feel particularly involved in the story.

Dave Howe, CEO of the Sci-Fi Channel commented:

"A television show that is on once a week isn't enough. The fans today want the experience to go beyond that. For example, we can tell them that there will be an alien invasion at a certain place in the game, at a certain time, and to be there with all their friends and be ready. The outcome depends on them. And then that battle will be part of the universe in the show."

Here's why it won't work... Simply put, viewers make bad writers. Part of the great experience of watching TV is to be led through a narrative, being surprised, horrified, and even disappointed. We WANT to talk about it at the watercooler, we WANT to blog about what a great (or crap) choice the writers and producers of the show have made.

The best shows on TV are those that don't have to listen to their fanbase, and that keep them guessing. It's also the reason that every choose your own adventure interactive TV show has failed.

For the foreseeable future, narrative TV will remain a lean-back experience, and as such, will require writers and producers to continue to take risks and deliver that ultimately elusive experience: innovation.

Links:
Slashdot | Sci-Fi Channel Merging TV Show with MMO
The original blog posting

Matthew Ingram: Twitter bears witness to the world

Matthew Ingram, The Globe And Mail's technology columnist, has advanced a truly exciting idea: namely that microblogging is our first line in the reporting of world events. Before the news stations can get a report out of a location, Twitterers are communicating the reality from a layperson's perspective. Moreover, he claims, Twitter provides a sort of 'first-hand account' of the events that shape our world, and that those who record and study history have new tools to determine what really happened, as it happened. Twitter is our brief, often honest first look at the events that will become the subject of history.

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Link to full blog post