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Cultural.cohesion.upload
The document discusses the challenges of managing large amounts of content and information in the modern world. It touches on topics like the exponential growth of capabilities, the need for better modeling of long term behaviors, new civic and commercial challenges, and the need for strategies to hedge against various issues. Overall, the document seems to be reflecting on the current information landscape and some of the problems that have emerged, as well as potential solutions or approaches to addressing these problems.
Cultural.cohesion.upload
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- 3. An ocean ofcontent The tick tock.
- 4. An ocean ofcontent The tick tock. A robust toolkit to marshal it
- 5. An ocean ofcontent The tick tock. A robust toolkit to marshal it New civic/commercial challenges
- 6. An ocean ofcontent The tick tock. A robust toolkit to marshal it New civic/commercial challenges Some hedging strategies
- 7. An ocean ofcontent The tick tock. A robust toolkit to marshal it New civic/commercial challenges Some hedging strategies A deep need for more
- 8. “Although our capabilitieshave been expanding geometrically, our ability to model their long term behavior has been increasing only arithmetically.” -Edward Tenner
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- 10. Then I met thisguy.
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- 14. On top ofall that.
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- 25. It’s a lotto get through.
- 26. The angst of themodern condition. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7VgNQbZdaw
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- 29. The best ofit.
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- 31. The worst ofit.
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- 34. The 90%. {
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- 45. Overinformed, unknowledgeable populace Playback. The “Search 22”
- 46. Overinformed, unknowledgeable populace Playback. The “Search 22” Massively parallel, affinity-based culture
- 47. Overinformed, unknowledgeable populace Playback. The “Search 22” Massively parallel, affinity-based culture Shrinking margin of error for natives
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- 51. Actionable metadata. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISxgVmRnFq8
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- 53. New submission paradigms. In the wake of Steve Jobs passing, we've found ourselves at a loss. Steve valued simplicity, clarity and elegance in everything he did. Here’s one attempt to keep that legacy alive. How would Steve simplify the complicated? What would he do? View Submissions
- 54. Your Contributions. #atomizationcures
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Editor's Notes
- #2 I spend most of my time thinking about the near future for my agency and her clients.\ntech. behavior. culture. commerce.\n\ni rarely get to talk to people outside of my craft about such issues, and i think they’re important to all of us, so thanks for having me.\nwe’re here today to talk about an on demand culture: one in which individuals are empowered to curate the media around them more granularly than ever before.\nIt’s an exciting time to be alive.\n\n
- #3 These elements are casually linked, but they aren’t stairstepped.\nSome overlap between them is assumed.\n
- #4 These elements are casually linked, but they aren’t stairstepped.\nSome overlap between them is assumed.\n
- #5 These elements are casually linked, but they aren’t stairstepped.\nSome overlap between them is assumed.\n
- #6 These elements are casually linked, but they aren’t stairstepped.\nSome overlap between them is assumed.\n
- #7 These elements are casually linked, but they aren’t stairstepped.\nSome overlap between them is assumed.\n
- #8 We’ve all seen this in one form or another.\nNegotiating, and ultimately reducing this delta is my job.\nbut it’s one i share with others: judges, urban planners, VCs, concerned citizens.\n\nTwo things i want you to do today:\n1. better understand the risks associated with our newfound freedom\n2. think about your role in all this\n\nOne thing i don’t want: note taking. every reference i’ll make here will be cited at the end, and you’ll be able to get your hands on everything.\n\n
- #9 I was a musician and storyteller.\nI started this band, that was always intended to be a niche product.\nwe were to be subsistence artists, emboldened by the collapse of the recording industry: all of a sudden, $10K and a good myspace following offered a fairly flat advantage to being signed by a major.\nand if you did it right, by the time the labels came knocking, you’d have leverage.\n\nI met a bunch of my heros, and they all said the same thing: “diversify. You’re lucky if the music breaks itself even.\nYour money won’t come from sales: it’ll come from everything else: the merch. the tours. the synchs.”\n\nLittle did we know streaming music was about to blow up, and change the game again: from ownership to mere access.\n\nit began a fascination on my part with the discrepancy between being valuable and being able to command a price.\nbut also a fascination with how we find the things we love.\nhow we build communities around them, and how that exercise governs our relationship with people both inside and without.\n
- #10 This guy is dan wieden; you may know him as the guy who, as the story goes, scribbled three little words on a napkin that changed the world.\n\nThey were?\n“Just do it.”\n\nHe’d made a career of making content that moved people. \ncontent that expanded their minds and opened their wallets.\n\nI admired him terribly. i asked how i could be down, and he let me in after listening to my record.\n\nI took a position on the newly-won converse account.\n\n
- #11 i was at the nexus of art and commerce.\n\nand i was responsible for connecting the people with the content: a craft we called channel planning or media planning.\n\nbut even in the few years it took to get good,i started sensing the signals that the center wouldn’t hold.\nIn these two years alone (my time on converse), we started seeing signs of our increasing inability to raise a big audience, especially concurrently.\nand when we did, we found that we never had a creative solution that satisfied all of them.\n...and if we relied just on media muscle to push an idea, a) we were missing a big opportunity to distribute more efficitently and b) we weren’t guaranteed the penetration you once were.\n\nwe were seeing a big shift toward user-curated media.\n in other words, if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.\n\ni got pretty good at developing work and systems that made ideas spread. I did so for music, videos, digital assets, video games, and a feature film.\n\n\n
- #12 5 years later, I looked up and i had made a career of launching and sustaining entertainment franchises.\n\nthen my boss lays a challenge at my feet: “get these guys ready for the inevitable future of digital fulfillment.”\nEA was on to something. one: their retailer relationships were a point of weakness: costly, and out of step with burgeoning consumer behavior.\nthey knew that they could develop for the long tail. but it’d change their business.\n\nthe big change for us though?\nwe went from merely promoting to actively merchandising.\nevery node in the system becomes a possible transaction point.\n\nso very quickly, my practice became about identifying the behavioral attributes of buyers. \nand finding ways to stay in their face.\n\na tall order considering the landscape. here’s why:\n\n\n\n
- #13 Meanwhile, as I was polishing channel planning chops: an explosion in software development.\nBlogging, then micro blogging changed publishing to a click, decimating the value prop of what had for hundreds of years been a specialized skill set. \nnapster, then Itunes brought the record industry to its knees.\nnetflix bought an island called manhattan from starz, for the equivalent of a few beads, then took over with installs on gaming consoles.\ncraigslist killed the classifieds.\n\nand almost everytime, the public won. wikipedia brought crowdsourcing into the public view. amazon flattened costs across the board, ushering in radical transparency. ebay created a grey marketplace. myspace got my band bookings.\n\nbut brands are freaking out.\nbecause concurrent reach disappears. because measurement gets more textured. because data gets more expensive.\non one side of this equation: ad blockers. audience fragmentation. audience empowerment. Crisis management at grassroots. \n\nthe question wan’t how can you best push to people: it was: how can you get them to pull, and push to others?\n\n\n\n
- #14 and this.\nBut let’s be clear: cord cutting isn’t about killing the content. \nIt’s about taking a more active role in it’s deployment.\nwhen, where, how, on what device.\nPicture it as cutting an umbilical chord.\nyou’re not failing to be nourished; you’re just no longer passively accepting it.\n\nHere’s an example of chord cutting that lives entirely in the digital world, so you can get a sense of the metaphor’s boundaries:\nA very popular gaming site saw fairly stunning traffic decline to it’s front page, which historically had been able to be marketed to media buyers at a premium.\nit got the most eyeballs, and it offered a broad pallette for creative.\nwhen the traffic dipped, it wasn’t because the content wasn’t in demand anymore, it was because people wanted it so bad, they’d port it.\n\n\n
- #15 the number of users of a popular gaming site who signed up to “follow” their favorite games, genres, and conversations via RSS tripled in one quarter.\nWhile they would click into side doors of the site, these users were done with the content the site chose to curate on it’s front page, and thus didn’t visit.\nSoon, the site was chasing us down, saying we could “roadblock” users who didnt’ come to the site, but consumed it’s content.\n\nit was a fix...like a bandaid is.\n
- #16 The hardware catches up with the software: tivo. iphone. itouch. ipad. kindle. 7th gen consoles, and then blueray.\nDesigned from the ground up to consume, sort, filter, and cache content.\nadopt standards that allow you to enjoy selfsame experiences across screens, enriching the value prop of the software.\nMany were mobile, could assume control of other devices, but all assumed their own connectivity: in that, comes the ability to call content from the cloud, interact in real time, store or bookmark what’s useful.\ncollectively, all these devices changed the user expectation of these screens: that instead of boxes that receive specific content someone else programs, they should all be windows to all the content you could think to request.\n
- #17 \nPage One: a year inside the NYT. A great doc. \n\nin the foreground: the impact of progress on established practice.\ntheir inability to monetize. the decline of their model. the scramble to replace it. Big media bedlam. irresponsible power, distributed like pollen.\nThey’re forced often to compete with their own work, aggregated by Huffpo, newser, and gawker. \nBusinesses that couldn’t be alive without them, but are, by merely existing, depleting their ability to provide their service.\n\nIn the background: deep philosophical questions about the nature of value.\n..about the role of big media.\n..about the economics of credibility.\n..and the future of truth.\n\n
- #18 Here’s the other side of the equation.\n\na shattering of the 80/20 rule.\nThe collapse of the one size fits all model, and the market of multitudes that rises from its ashes.\nthe economics of the broadcast era--requiring hits to get big buckets of audiences--being reversed in the broadband era.\n\nso consider: you’re in a coffee shop in seattle. it’s playing a local artist you’ve never heard. you whip out your phone, which listens to id it, then enables you to buy it on the spot.\nthat was the promise then. it’s realized now.\n\nThe rise of massclusivity.\nthe flooding of the mainstream.\nan evolutionary leap for commerce.\n
- #19 brilliant, and worth a read. but focused on the sunny side of things: Clay argues that people will contribute on a global scale to the better good.\na trillion hours of time a year to contribute he says: we’re gonna get some good stuff.\n\n“we were couch potatoes because we had to be.” we’re exiting that phase.\nwe got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals. If the first few years of the internet emphasized the former, the latter’s on the way.\n\nsocial constraints create a culture that was more generous than the contractual restraints.\nmeaningfully, he creates a distinction between communal value and civic value.\n
- #20 Okay, so lots of professional thinkers are excited for or afraid of what’s next. \nAnd you know why my industry is so up in arms about where everything will land, which is why jobs like mine exist.\n\nLet’s get a sense for what we’re talking about before we move on to why it’s important to all of us.\n\n\n
- #21 60 days > 60 years: More video is uploaded in two months than the three major U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) combined created in six decades. \n4 million: Number of people connected to YT and auto-sharing to at least one social network. \n250 million – Number of tweets per day\n110 million: Number of blogs between WP and tumblr\n100 billion – Estimated number of photos on Facebook by mid-2011.\nYour takeaway: there’s waaaaay too much to see/hear/experience/play/consume everything.\n\n\n\n
- #22 \n3.3: petabytes of monthly bandwidth used by imgur.com\n3 billion: hours spent gaming\n56: % US households who own current consoles (nielsen)\n140: The number of YouTube video playbacks per person on Earth\n30: % of internet bandwidth consumed by netflix playback\nYour takeaway: we’re trying our damnedest to drink it all.\n
- #23 Your takeaway: the coming generation will have an expectation of bespoke content.\nThey’ll choose. they’ll accept recommendations. they’ll search. but they won’t let the wave just crash over them.\nit also says that they make no distinction between channels or the content running in them the way we do. \na media planner will look at this and say: you can’t see modern family or anything else on tv on youtube. but these kids don’t (and won’t when they’re not kids) care.\n\n
- #24 When anyone can say anything, almost everyone says something.\nThe sparsest commodity in this equation? attention span.\nThe most plentiful? choice.\n\nat stake? the ties that bind us: shared experiences, that produce shared realities. Common standards and references, that produce common ground.\n\nCultural cohesion.\n\n
- #25 A funny take on the angst of the modern condition: so much to consume, so little time.\nPart of the humor here is about the reputation of portland as being a place of utter leisure. Nobody has time to read that much. but in pdx...\nThe citizens have tons of free time, or “cognitive surplus,” as clay shirky would have it. It’s “where young people go to retire.” \n\nbut what’s the missing insight vis a vis our discussion? \nthat this won’t scale.\nwe’re not this uniform. that’d be both boring and scary.\nit’s..tribal.\n\nthey’re constructing and reinforcing a worldview; dictating a cultural narrative. and you get the sense that they’d scoff at anyone who doesn’t share it.\nyou also get the sense that most people don’t.\nthe question this begs is:\nwhat happens when you put these people in a room with those who haven’t read these things? or, who read other unrelated things? \nthe answer is: divergence.\n\n
- #26 This is where everything bottoms out.\nThe onus of choice moves from an elite few to the whole.\nbut not the collective whole: the individuals within it.\n\nThe old media paradigm was autocratic, true: but the movement we’re seeing isn’t democratization: it’s better described as atomization.\n\nThis is not a class voting on what they want to learn.\nIt’s each student deciding what they want to learn.\n\n\n
- #27 \nthose who live up to the requirement of the paradigm: to continuously audit and refine their media input.\nThose who become beacons for others.\nThose who publish and edit longform.\nthose who most actively select content, experiences, and communities, with little “thrown in nuetral.”\n
- #28 When they choose wisely, you’re about to see an era where people can become their best, most textured selves.\n\n\n
- #29 and here’s what they’ll use.\n
- #30 \nYou’ll also see hyper-specialization. This is how you get a candidate who knows everything there is to know about domestic energy policy, but doesn’t know why south and north korea are separate nations.\nThe wrong mix, and you’ll have an echo chamber of opinions and facts.\nwhat does this mean: new sets of references. less surface share between niche values.\n\n
- #31 And here’s how that happens.\n
- #32 “By giving the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised.\nThey encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish.\nIn thrall to our little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.”\n\nchristine rosen\n\n\n\n
- #33 Most of us.\n\n\n
- #34 This is facebook’s edge rank algorithm.\n\nan Object is more likely to show up in your News Feed if people you know have been interacting with it recently.\nThe more populous the platform, the more it will automate as much as possible.\n\nBIG data sets. invasive data sets. and, most importantly to today, prescriptive data.\nmeandering will require considerable effort given the algorithm’s optimization objective: “relevance.”\n\nInputs:\nClickstream (your history)\nClickstream (our history)\nSocial weighting (your friends’ history)\n
- #35 The curator (in this case, the algortihm) has a built in incentive to show you what you already believe.\nvariations on what you’ve already seen.\nposts from users you tend to interact with.\n\nno way to discover new things as you mature and move through life stages.\nIncredibly tough to break a persona, especially for natives, who have more data to overcome.\n
- #36 We’ve seen the rise of recommendation engines powered by others, some whom you know, and others not so much.\nangies list is just the tip of the iceberg.\nthis will become more dominant as the years pass.\n
- #37 Emerson wrote: \n“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? \nWhy should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”\n\nwhat’s the getting at? 1st hand experience as a teacher.\n\nAnd that’s great on many levels. But we’re forgetting the pleasures of not knowing--and of discovering. “I’m no Luddite, but we’ve started replacing actual experience with someone else’s already digested knowledge.”\n
- #38 everything the net has to offer, right behind this door.\nAnything your heart desires.\ngo.\n\n
- #39 the results today? \n\naside from phrase match, it’s largely the clickstream activity of anyone who’s ever searched that term.\n\n1st result: the most clicked result when people query.\n\nthe net using population is your proxy to the truth.\nto the answer.\nflawed as it is, it’s at least balanced.\n\n
- #40 The G+ project gives thinkers like me pause.\nAdd social weighting to this equation.\n\nthe results? \nit’s largely the clickstream activity of people you’re connected to who’ve ever searched or written about that term.\n\n1st result: the most clicked result when people you know query.\nyour network is your proxy.\nhow pure is your network?\n
- #41 Remember what your mom said about knucklehead friends?\nstill true.\n\nnow, instead of just pruning your own footprint to control for outflow, you’re pruning your network to control for inflow.\nBIG responsibility, perhaps too big for a teenager: it’s daunting even for us, who have a better grasp on long term effects.\n\nalso, it’s tough to achieve diversity of thought without manually adjusting the network.\nhow many digital natives have enough sense to do this? \nand how will they discover new networks witht he algorithms working so hard to deliver them “relevance,” as dictated by their history?\n \n\n\n
- #42 these are legitimate, compounding problems. but that’s no reason to slam on the brakes. \n\n
- #43 these are legitimate, compounding problems. but that’s no reason to slam on the brakes. \n\n
- #44 these are legitimate, compounding problems. but that’s no reason to slam on the brakes. \n\n
- #45 these are legitimate, compounding problems. but that’s no reason to slam on the brakes. \n\n
- #46 here are a few ways we can steer into the slide.\n\n\n
- #47 This is the new narrative flow prescribed by a multimedia editor at NYT.\nit rewards, but does not require, dalliance.\n\nbetter represent key tensions which might otherwise be represented as poles on a continuum: discovery/nostalgia, activity/passivity, personal/communal/, etc. \n\nthe roundabouts could be anything: content themes, formats (video, pictures, rich data), chapters, contextual zooms (in or out), recommendations, bookmarking/queueing activities, whatever.  \n\nSolid chassis for almost any comms structure: it accepts that people have the power to decide, but it emphasizes that there’s more, and offers easy navigation in and out of the main “story.”\nMoreover, for planners of this kind of experience, it better represents key tensions which might otherwise be represented as poles on a continuum: discovery/nostalgia, activity/passivity, personal/communal/, etc. \n\n\n\n\n
- #48 traditional search gives us access to knowledge, but "tells us only what the world already knows."\n\n“This search engine is designed ‘for anyone on the edges of their knowledge field, creating fresh perspectives that can lead to new kinds of understanding and innovation.’”\n\n\n\n
- #49 broad application of digital metadata. \nfloating reminders of counterpoints.\n updated in real time. sensitive to user inputs, but optimized to present the full story (in all it’s shades).\n
- #50 platforms that encourage single-stop connections and interactions.\nexperiences that pre-wire anonymity.\nbuilding relationships that aren’t intended to persist.\nthe rise of location-based narrative.\nfinding other reasons to connect than shared interests. \nother reasons to cooperate than social proximity.\n\n\n
- #51 \nIt blends the utility of a link shortener with the the ability to anonymously curate specific types of content for others.\nThe public footprint it leaves can be surfed for thematically relevant content.\n....and the content theme is identified by the shortened links, recognizable even before you click.\n\n
- #52 What will you do?\nwhat will you tell the people close to you? \nWill you adopt and support new platforms?\nbuild them?\n\nhow will your hiring criteria be affected?\nhow will you encourage your kids and other youngsters you influence to use the net?\nHow will you change your habits?\n\n\n\n\n
- #53 \n