101 Culture

This is a blog about the emergence of a digital culture. What might it look like? What can we see already?

And all my other details are kept at benmason.org.


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Downfall writer praises Hitler rant meme

'I find those parodies tremendously amusing' says the writer of the widely parodied film, Downfall.

Since 2006, there have been hundreds of parodies of the scene where Hitler shouts at his senior staff with alternate meanings added through subtitles.

It's nice to see the originator of a piece of content subject to so much copyright infringement show his appreciation. He even goes as far as discussing how the parody which focussed on Hitler's losses in the 2008 property market crash was historically relevant.

"Hitler's real crisis at the time was also about a gigantic real estate loss: the loss of all those territories he had conquered, fueled by false credit and driven by avarice, megalomania and barbaric ruthlessness. And then history's Dow Jones came crushing down on him… I find this parody so funny because it's historically relevant."

Full article at The Register
Found via @BenShaw

Culturally digital comedy from Baratunde Thurston

Here's a presentation from comedian Baratunde Thurston at Web2.0 conference.

He talks about a couple of comedy experiments that he started on Twitter and a multitude that he was involved with or watched.

It's well worth a watch. And watch it considering the topics I bang on about on this blog: That with digital media and the internet everything is becoming more collaborative and open. And also how successful ideas start small and public and then grow a evolve with participation.

The audience/producer line is very blurred in the examples Thurston gives. The two projects he founded are comedy collaborations that start with a single tweet. They then grow and evolve into other media, as I've discussed here before.

Nice work.

Wisdom of crowds or stupidity of mobs?

After a post about the crowd taking the power from the old centralised leadership in these digital days, someone suggested that I examine whether this is a good thing or not.

The conclusion is, of course, that it's a bit of both. Quite simply: Crowds bring democracy to temper the individual rogue but they have the ability to get it very wrong.

As an example of the crowd's voice tempering a centralised leadership, take the example Clay Shirky always gives of the earthquake in China in 2008. Due to citizens publishing pictures instantly online, the government was unable to deny its devastation. Compare this to a similar earthquake in the 1970s, the occurrence of which was denied for 3 months.

But crowds also have the ability to misthink. In concept known as confirmation bias, we tend to look for corroboration of our opinions. And so we take that as confirmation that we're right. We select the information that reinforces our thinking.

And to further confound this, Josie Fraser discusses the nature of homphily in social groups, where we build relationships around similarities. "Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order." from Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

As vast online crowds become structured more through social connections rather than informational ones, it seems likely that homophily will lead to more mob stupidity than crowd wisdom.

But as Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody, "Arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject... Society before and after revolution are too different to be readily compared; it’s simple to say that society was transformed by the printing press or the telegraph, but harder to claim that it was made better."

How to tell stories in the digital age

I've long been meaning to write about the future of storytelling. At Hyper we've done some work on a famous BBC drama brand which looked at how to tell stories in a digital culture.

But today I came across this talk which does a great job and inspired me to write this post.

It's clear that the future of storytelling will be less linear and more collaborative than the books and films we take as standard now. Everything in the information age is becoming less linear and more collaborative.

But when considered alongside music 'piracy' and a decline in TV ad revenues, there's a lot of fear about the value of storytelling in the digital age and whether anyone will be able to afford to invest in high quality production. Will the combination of the internet and digital media production mean that everyone will produce content for free but no one will be able to produce professional content? 

Lance Weiler talks a good stance on this in his talk. He takes it as given that content is decreasing in value. And therefore asks what is the value proposition to come. And given the collaborative nature of the coming age, he talks about storytelling as service related rather than production related.

He also talks about the fluid nature of digital information and the need to tell stories that evolve through people's networks on their terms. Something I've discussed here before. And along the same theme, he talks about how he constructs stories against three audience types: watchers, players and agents (people that are involved enough to affect the direction of the story).

When discussing what might happen to storytelling in digital media with another Hyper client recently, I talked about campfires. Before recorded media, stories were told around campfires. They adjusted to their audience and they evolved over time as they moved from campfire to campfire via many storytellers.

Storytelling in a digital age seems to be moving towards a similar power structure - the story spreads itself and moulds around its audience. This contrasts to film production where one central producer retains control of the storytelling process until the end of the film viewing. The difference from the campfire age being that different media available to the teller (film, image and text, as well as the traditional audio) and the size of his audience (global population, perhaps).

So rather than theorise anymore, here are some brilliant examples from around the connected campfire:

We Tell Stories

An investigation into storytelling by Penguin which involved six different authors telling six stories over six weeks. The formats varied from writing stories live to using a map as the format to read from. 

http://wetellstories.co.uk/

 

Good Radio Club

Using Twitter to have an open discussion about a live radio programme as it plays.

http://goodradioclub.co.uk/

 

Loose Fish

A project to adapt classic works of literature for digital age. This is a personal project of someone experimenting with storytelling on the web and trying to find a method that fits the way people use the web. 

http://www.loose-fish.com


This project includes:

The Good Captain

An adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno. Since the story is told in the first person, it was well suited to Twitter. Once told on Twitter, the story was republished in book format, available as a download or printed.

 http://www.loose-fish.com/waifpole/the-good-captain/

 

Spoon River Metblog

A modernization of the poetry serial Spoon River Anthology written and published in the form of a fictional local city blog and hosted amongst non-fictional city blogs in the Metroblog syndicate.

http://spoonriver.metblogs.com/

The next Loose Fish project will be a contemporary version of Pride and Prejudice told using Facebook, Twitter and web services.

 

Tube Gossip

A collection of comments overheard on the London Tube.

http://www.themanwhofellasleep.com/gossip.html

 

SXStarwars

The public reenactment of scenes from Star Wars on Twitter started with just a few friends playing Star Wars characters and by the time they’d finished just minutes later, so many people were involved that the production carried on with new participants taking on parts. 

http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2009/03/18/twitter-trench-run/

 

Noone Belongs Here More Than You

A website promoting a novel which shows the author learning to make the website as she goes along. 

http://noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com/

 

I Love Bees

From the very simple to the more complex, I Love Bees was a campaign to promote Halo 2, a blockbuster computer game. It took the format of an ARG (alternate reality game). ARGs are collaborative games or narratives where the story exists on many platforms in the real and virtual world at once and is non-linear. Think of the most complex treasure hunt possible and you’re in the right area. For instance, a participant might have to call a phone box to find a code to type into a website to get the next clue. Participants share their clues online to try and solve the puzzle collaboratively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_love_bees

http://ilovebees.com/

  

Lonely Girl 15

The show focuses on the life of a fictional teenage girl named Bree, whose YouTube username is the eponymous "lonelygirl15", but the show does not reveal its fictional nature to its audience. After the fictional status of the show was revealed in September 2006, the show gradually evolved into a multi-character show including both character videoblogs and action sequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonely_Girl_15

http://www.youtube.com/user/lonelygirl15

The Future of Twitter

...according to Steve Rubel:

He writes much more about it here.

#Rihannalive and why everything online needs to be an event

I just caught the end of Rihanna's album launch gig live online from Nokia.

It was quite amazing to watch a gig live with what, due to Twitter, seemed like millions of others live online.

As Jay-Z made a surprise appearance, it just emphasised how important it is that putting content online is made into an event. Doing something live is a way to keep it scarce and therefore valuable.

Someone tweeted, " hope the bootleggers recording this so i can watch it later too ". I'd say the music industry probably has a lot to look forward to with this format. It's scalable to any size of artist. And with the power of Twitter to spread content fast and bring vast audiences together, it works as marketing for big brands as well.

#rihannalive trended. Even #BrazilLovesRihanna seemed to be everywhere.

The gig was a mile from my house. And I could have got a ticket through work (Hyper does the Nokia Music social media work). But I caught it by accident after seeing a tweet.

The much discussed 'attention economy' is easily understood in this situation.Kudos to Nokia.

4 reasons why the proposal for London's Cloud is more digital than some might think

In order to help formulate ideas around what a culture heavily influenced by digital tech would look like, I often look in areas that seem quite far from what we perceive as digital. See my post on what a culturally digital farm would look like.

So it was with great pleasure that I saw the BBC headline, 'Digital cloud plan for city skies'.

Architects have pitched the idea of a giant observation deck to sit above London as a statement  building for the Olympic park. Its name is to be The Cloud, which is likely both a play on its appearance (inflated and amorphous), the fact that it sits high above London, the fact parts of it will move with the wind and perhaps the fact that it will represent our collective conscious as it displays data - a play on cloud computing.

It seems at first pass that the digital part of the description refers to the amount of data flowing around the observation deck. But it runs much deeper than that. The building would be a monument to the age we're living in - 'an age of atoms and bits' as the proposal states. It's a monument to digital culture that goes way deeper than a passing reference to information. This could be the first culturally digital building in the world.

It's no co-incidence that it fits with the principles of digital culture which become apparent in writing this blog. Compared to buildings gone before, just as digital culture compares to cultures gone before, it's more collaborative, open and decentralised and scalable.

Collaborative
The funding will be crowdsourced. The data which provides much of the spectacle comes from the crowd. And, rather brilliantly, much of the energy the building requires will be generated by the people walking around it - crowdgeneration, if it needs coining.

Open
I think the very fact they published this proposal before the final decision is made shows a great understanding of digital culture. They know that they're better to gain popularity by publishing it. Ideas for the digital age grow in public.

Decentralised
This is a building in harmony with its environment. Culturally digital structures tend to work much more in collaboration with a wider environment. Consider the aforementioned farm versus a 20th Century factory farm. In The Cloud, people and climate contribute power. People and climate contribute information and experience. It works as a live barometer of our culture. Its as interconnected with our conscious as any building's ever been.

Scalable
The public, interconnected and collaborative nature of the digital age means that scalable ideas fit best. Opensource software starts with one piece of code and scales. The 'memes' that fly round online are eminently scalable as they evolve with people's interaction. Look how big LOLcats or Starwars kid got. This building 'can be built for £5 or £50m', say the architects.

I'm fully in support of this. In fact, let's embrace the publication as all good digital citizens should. Let's make it happen.

I suggest everyone who's a fan get over to Twitter and start promoting it. Is this really Boris' decision? I don't think so. Let's build it anyway. #raisethecloud

Blessed are the geeks for they will inherit the world

Moving-toward-a-geek-culture
I don't know who said that first. But John Hodgman told PSFK why the geek's time on the podium might finally be coming.

'I think that we are necessarily moving toward a geek culture. The health of our society is going to rely on information technology. It’s going to rely on a familiarity with math and science and technology. Geekery in general is founded on questioning and proof via analysis of the actual world and not the world as we wish it to be. By contrast, jockdom — not sports — jock culture proceeds from a certainty you create in your mind: ‘My town is the best because the incredibly wealthy owners decided to keep the team for now.’ Or, ‘My political team is the best because it was my dad’s and they best stoke my primitive fears,’ as opposed to ‘They have the best policies for me and my family.’

2 reasons why Dawkin's meme concept is so important in digital culture

Photo

I saw these T-shirts with Barack Obama and Martin Luther King on them for sale in the Elephant and Castle market and it reminded me of the thinking I've been doing around how ideas spread in a digital world. The Obama campaign was a triumph and heralded as an example of how messages should be communicated in a connected world of digital media. And those are the two reasons that things are changing: 

1. All media is becoming digital. Film, image, audio and text becomes more flexible, entirely compatible and cheap to produce using digital tools.
2. Every individual is becoming connected to the internet, a two-way communications network.

The result of this is that everyone is becoming a producer of digital media. Whether you're making YouTube videos or sending emails, you're a producer of digital media. And you're constantly publishing  to your social group via Facebook, email and IM, let alone the potential audience of billions online.

This makes Dawkin's meme concept much more important than it used to be. I referred to it as the natural selection of the most interesting in my first ever post. Since everyone's a producer with a large potential audience, successful ideas replicate and evolve much faster than before. Compare it to watching a political broadcast 15 years ago. Your interpretation of it would most likely only be heard by those in the room with you.

The Obama campaign harnessed this brilliantly as evidenced by the mashup T-shirt above. Obama's race is more pertinent to the designer of this Tshirt so the link to Martin Luther King was his take on Obama's 'Change' idea.

So if you want to to spread ideas, whether you're an advertiser, journalist or teacher, you need to think how you're ideas will spread through the digital media produced by your audience.

I have plenty of thoughts on how to do that but they'll have to wait for another post.