Hugh Garry

The Power of Choice

A great talk from Alex Carloss from Youtube on the difference between an audience and a fanbase. I particularly like this:

"An audience tunes in when they're told to. A fanbase chooses when and what to watch... An audience changes the channel when their show is over. A fanbase shares, it comments, it curates and it creates. An audience lives within your borders. A fanbase breaks those borders down".

He went on to highlight four things Youtube has enabled sans to do. Fans ignore timeslots (on demand), fans become talent (Youtube stars), fans pay tribute (parody videos) and fans blur borders (K-Pop explosion). When talking about how fans blur borders he makes the point that the most interesting thing about Gangnam Style is not the video itself but its legacy. Before Gangnam Style K-Pop produced 2 billion Youtube views. Post Gangnam Style it has 7 billion. 91% of K-Pop videos are now watch outside of Asia. 

The latenight US chatshows get this and Youtube has become the new battlefield between Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brien with all shows seeing a boost in TV ratings as a result of their efforts on Youtube. 

A Brilliant Talk on Attention

If you're a cultural entrepreneur then Matt Locke's talk on Empires of Attention for Radio 4's Four Thought show is one of the the most important listens this year. 

Attention defines our culture and as Matt points out the great cultural entrepreneurs have been the ones that know how to listen to, understand and measure attention.

From BuzzFeed all the way back to the 18th century taverns and pleasure gardens Matt tells the story of how the interaction between artists and audiences has moved from 'visceral participation to abstract measurement and back again via the birth of musical halls, cinema, TV and the internet'.

Building for new paterns of attention is one of the cornerstones of how we work at Storythings. Paying attention to how audiences are consuming, sharing and behaving around culture is something we obsess over. As a spectator sport there has never been a better time to be a fan.

The rigid cultural attention patterns of my childhood (music was split into 3 minute singles and 45 minute albums whilst TV was mostly 30 or 60 minute episodes or 90 minute films) seemed to hang around for what seemed like decades. Now our attenion is spread anywhere between a 6 second vine, glance up glance down reality TV and weekend long Netflix binges. The pace of change in audience behavior is so rapid one dare not take ones eye off them in fear they'll vanish quicker than a snapchat photo.

Empires of Attention is the book Matt is always threatening to write and the book I desperately want to read. I really hope he gets it written soon.

To make ideas stick...

...we need to make human personal connections. So much of what Rohit talks about here is what I’ve found myself talking about quite a bit recently. Give it a watch, it’s only 8 minutes long.

Rohit makes reference to what has been described as ‘the most unlikely political seduction ever’. He talks about how Nelson Mandela would invite his enemies for tea. Over that tea he would talk to them and listen to them. These moments are widely regarded as the reasons he managed to avoid violent confrontations. I like the idea of the simple act of having a brew with someone as ‘seduction’. Quite powerful when you think of it that way. I know I’ve had many innocent chats with people over a cup of tea that changed my life.

We appear to be living in an increasingly binary world. Just think how much time we spend making judgements on people whilst sat in front of a screen. A piece of glass between us and them. That judgement might be based on big data or small actions on social media. From Facebook ‘Likes’ to the bile you often see in the comments on Youtube, thanks to the new social norms we are encouraged to love or hate based on very little information.

It’s easy to hate someone on the other side of border, whether that border is a screen or an ideology as in the case of Madela. It’s much harder to hate someone when they are sat facing you over a cup of tea having a conversation.

As I said here I worry about over reliance of big data and the disappearance of the ‘human’ behind the numbers. The two worlds need to collide to give us strong insights that will help us tell great stories. Charities get this. They have the data but spend a long time on the ground making human connections. Then when it comes to telling their story they’ve realised that telling the story of an individual gives the audience a greater insight (and therefore more likely to put their hand in their pocket) than just giving big numbers.

Next time Comic Relief comes around take note of how they use those human stories alongside the numbers. The story of a thousand people dying is often less effective than telling the story of an individual. It give the audience a chance to make a personal connection.

Mandela made his ideas stick through human connection. Comic Relief make their ideas stick through human connections To make ideas stick we need to make human personal connections. That means more cups of tea to go with the data, which is fine by me.

Parody videos - the start of an important conversation

Last night I spoke at a great event in Manchester about audeinces. I talked about the how they are in a constant state of flux and how you can never fully understand your audeince because they are constantly changing their behaviours. The best you can do is get amongst them rather than learning about them via powerpoint. The life of the parody video is a great example of this. Their place in fan culture fascinates me.

I was speaking to a group of students at Salford University earlier this month about the cultural value of parody videos. Even the terrible ones. I made the arguement that the really terrible ones may be more important than the really good ones.  

Let me explain.

As I pointed out yesterday most people are waiting for permission to make their moves. As social creatures we take our cues from those around us. We are a nation that needs nudging. We like to copy. Mark Earl talks about this in his book 'I'll Have What She's Having'. 

I explained to the students that for every terrible parody video on Youtube there will be hundreds of super talented viewers saying to themselves "I can do better than that". The terrible parody video is what it took to kickstart their creative career.

So a few day later I was at the Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT in Boston listening to Dorian Electra being questioned about her music videos. "So how did you get started?" came the question. "Oh, you know, I saw a really terrible parody video on Youtube and thought 'I can do better than that'".

In a networked culture everything you make will be part of an ongoing conversation. The conversation will take what you've made to the most unusual places creating scenarios you could never have imagined. Quite often the results can be magical even if your cultural artefact isn't so. 

The media makers are just the starting point of that conversation. Designing for an 'audience with an audience' is a new way of thinking that embraces the power of audience as a 'circulator' or a 'multiplier'. It's easy to dismiss how we label our 'audience' as semantics but putting the labels at the centre of your thinking helps focus on humans and human behaviours and should completely change how you design your experience.       

A tool for listening to culture

When hip hop broke in the mid 70's Levis, not recognising the full cultural impact, chose to ignore it. The cost of the company's culture not being aligned with that of its audience is alleged to be somewhere in the region of $1 billion. US electronics store Best Buy stumped up $700 million for music retailer Musicland in 2001 failing to recognise that the teens with Best Buy Saturday jobs were using Kazaa and then Limewire to get their music. Best Buy ended up giving it away years later. The lesson here being that you have to spot shifts in culture as they happen and adapt your company's culture to fit.

Listening to your audience isn't something that started when digital culture exploded, it's just been made easier thanks to the vapour trails of data left by people using digital products and the rise of analytic tools. Good analytic tools have become an essential part of the kit for trying to understand your audience - they are great at what they are made for - that being analysing data that will enable you to look for patterns. The problem is that they're deaf to culture and won't help you build an algorithm for curiosity. Spotting trends is different from understanding culture. If you don't understand the culture of your audience then you'll have problems slipping seamlessly into their lives.

To understand an audience you must go beyond hearing a really start listening, a differentiation many struggle to grasp. Hearing is simply taking stuff in whereas listening is processing and knowing how to act on the information once you have it. I recently heard someone describe a good listener as someone who doesn't need to be given a christmas present list from their partner, they just know what to buy and why their partner wants it. There is a difference between knowing someone and knowing about someone. 

The question most people want answering is how do you listen to culture when there isn't an app for that? Paying attention to curators is a good starting point. I spent 15 years working at Radio 1, a network whose culture is perfectly matched with that of its audience. How do they achieve this? Easy. Management constantly surrounds itself with curators. The DJs are curators. Many of the networks producers are either DJs or club promoters. Some run their own music websites and many blog about their culture. There are curators at every level. The audience culture runs through every corridor and office in the building. 

In an information age curators are a great filter to help us make sense of culture. They enable serendipity, can find usefulness in useless knowledge and point us to the stuff we didn't know that we needed to know. They are not just aggregators. Over time they have built up a set of tools for unearthing the things that make life interesting and developed a tone that is both inviting an reassuring. These are skills not acquired easily or quickly.

The rise of tools like Tumblr and Posterous are behind the much talked about 'rise of the curator', which has muddied the water a little. Having a Tumblr does not make one a curator. Pointing at new things does not make one a curator. Pick your creators wisely and recognise the difference between curators and those who label themselves coolhunters or trend forcasters.  This is not a judgement, simply a differentiation. Curation is a skill that is journalistic and editorial, creating a frame around the content they share, adding depth and understanding. They add context and a point of view.

So if you want to build a toolbox for listening to culture, which you really should, start by adding a few good curators. 

Banksy on Advertising

I was lecturing at Salford University last week on the subject of 'Spreadable Media' and I referenced the moment Kanye jumped on stage and snatched the microphone from Taylor Swift's hand. It was a moment of inadvertant transition for Kanye. He went from adopting classic interuption marketing (interupting the media we are consuming to attract attention to a brand) to becoming a piece of spreadable media. The minute he tried to own the stage in such a spectacular way the moment no longer belonged to Kanye, nor Taylor, it belonged to the audience. 

On Friday night I stumbled upon this great quote from Banksy on advertising via the excellent The Fox is Black. Wish I'd had it in time for the lecture. 

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs. Banksy

Attention and the reverse butterfly

This talk could well be up there as one of my favourite TED talk's. Maybe it's because I stumbled across it as I was half way through her excellent book 'The Philisophical Baby'. Anyway, it's great. Watch it. 

The book looks at how babies experience the world through play and experimentation and as a result learn at incredible rates. Describing children as the research and development department of the human species she points out that, like artists, children are able to imagine how the world could be different.

With age comes focus, caused mainly by institutions such as school and the workplace. It's not that children are 'bad at paying attention' they're just bad at 'not paying attention'. They're bad at getting rid of all the interesting peripheral things that could tell them something and just focusing on the thing that's 'important'. I like the reverse butterfly analogy she uses whereby adults are the caterpillars and babies are the butterflies:

"Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species, kind of like caterpillars and butterflies, except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path".

She also goes on to talk about the impact mediation and travel has on our attention, something I blogged about recently. All great stuff.

Noticing the normal

Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo in 2008 Clay Shirky made the point that one of the big problems we face today isn't information overload, as the millions of articles written on the subject in recent times suggest, but filter failure. How content providers attract attention and how consumers manage the avalanche information is always going to be a challenge in this age of abundance.

Listen to the above clip. Quite dull I guess. What can we say about it? Well, it was clearly recorded near a road. There are cars and mopeds passing. There's the faint sound of voices in the background. And there is the sound of sweeping. That's about it. Pretty unremarkable.

I captured this sound, like one would a photograph, whilst traveling in Indonesia. Something compelled me to record it. It's one of many sounds to go with the photos and videos of events that caught my attention on the trip. All quite normal I guess, but noticing the normal has been happening a lot recently. It's something I've been thinking about since I played Papasangre sat under a bridge in Austin whilst waiting for the bats to come out and do their evening turn. I had half an hour to kill so I put on my headphones and played the game. If you don't know Papasangre is a video game with no video. You navigate this crazy frightening world using nothing but sound to direct you. It's brilliant. Download it.

It got me thinking about my ears and how I take them for granted. On the way back to my hotel I decided to pay less attention to my journey though my eyes and more attention with my ears by looking down at the pavement as I walked. The city became a new place, alive with events I might not have noticed had I been scanning the scenery for visual stimulation. Normal sounds became interesting, exciting and occasionally dramatic. Sirens, loud voices, screeching tyres all soundtracked the imaginary movie script building in my brain. It's amazing what catches the attention when you apply a little bit of deprivation. I experienced massive filtering of the content with slight adjusting the receptors. Perhaps being a fan of radio has primed me for painting pictures with the mind. 

When you travel simple things you might normally ignore become interesting too. All senses are on alert for sounds, sights and smells that might not get a second of attention at home: voices at a bus stop, the smell of a local market, an exchange between a shop keeper and a customer, the way street signs are written - that's why there are more than 100,000 photos of fire hydrants on Flickr. 

There are angels in the architecture of our surrounds which are lost to bombardment of familiarity that our attention seems to naturally gravitate to. When everything becomes unfamiliar the interesting stories become more noticeable as our attention seeks to make sense of this swarm of new information. You observe more, question everything and seek to make connections between the new bits of information. This is the opposite to what I talk about above. It's a way of adding focus by removing all filters. 

Let me tell you more about the sound recording. It was captured in a cafe in Ubud, the cultural capital of Bali. I was having a cup of tea and making use of the cafe's free wifi when the intermittent sound of sweeping caught my attention. Across the street a young lady was waiting for breaks in traffic so that she could go out into the road and sweep away the remains of this morning's spiritual offerings in preparation to lay more - an act that would be repeated many times throughout the day.

Hinduism is the dominant religion in Bali and as part of their daily routine the women must lay offerings, plaited palm baskets filled with coloured petals and rice, around their houses and throughout the streets. Sometimes the offerings would contain a biscuit or a sweet. I wonder whether it is the Gods or the demons that have the sweet tooth. A huge amount of the day is taken up plaiting the containers and preparing the offering, an act that all girls learn from their parents and grandparents at an early age. The offerings are a way of thanking their God for the richness of their lives, whist at the same time making bargains with demons, which they believe house themselves in all physical objects (occasionally you would see offerings on sat on the seat of a bicycle or on a bin). 

She swept away the last of the remaining pink, blue and red petals, removed the basket which held them, and cleared the road for more to be laid in a ritual that was so elegant, tranquil and beautiful to observe that it almost made the chaos of the traffic vanish. What might normally be an annoying sound became something quite beautiful. With the added knowledge of why she was sweeping the road the familiar sound of bristles scraping concrete became attention worthy. You didn't have to see the ritual, just hear the sound.  

I don't really have a point other than the solution to the problem maybe to either fix the filter as Clay suggests or give out even more information. I might be wrong but I think we take photos of fire hydrants when we visit America because it makes us think of Starsky and Hutch. Without the extra knowledge of the Hindu offerings my audio is quite dull. With it the sound of the sweeping became worthy of my attention and is recorded as a permanent reminder of the thousands of offerings laid by amazing people in the beautiful country of Bali.