By now you’ve probably seen this video. If not, I think it’s worth the 5 minutes. Go ahead.
Cute, isn’t it? And given the 11M views so far it seems that’s a majority opinion.
Eleven million views. At a running time of just over 5 minutes, that’s about 100 years of human attention dedicated so far to this video in the week or so that it’s been on YouTube.
Was that the plan? I think it sort of was.
When you share a video on YouTube, you’re sharing it with 3 groups of people. In ascending order of size (and decreasing order of social proximity to you in the context of the video) these groups consist of:
people you know who were there
people you know who weren’t there
people you don’t know who weren’t there
At this point, views of this video by groups 1 & 2 combined as a % of the total are probably small enough to be swallowed by a rounding error.
From the time it started showing up in linkblogs over the weekend it belonged to group #3. It’s us who’ve seen to it that this video was played for a century over a matter of days.
That happened because this video was made for us to watch. We didn’t need to be there to get it. The wedding procession is a story we all know. This one’s amusing because of the thousands of videos of other wedding processions that aren’t amusing at all. Those other videos were made for group #1 alone (and a small subset of it at that). We don’t want to watch these videos but invariably we occasionally do, knowing our attention is being wasted.
If 99% of everything is crap, then the emergence of a new category of crap — in this case the YouTube wedding procession video – comes with an opportunity for those with the right kind of talent to seize attention on a scale previously unimaginable.
So let’s enjoy the 1% and be grateful for the tools and channels that let the tiny amusing minority cut through the crap like never before.
Yes, most social media is crap. But some of it is the Best. Crap. Ever.
Sorry -- I thought you were going to say something
I more or less stopped writing fiction and poetry after grad school. It was probably a combination of factors that put me off it in the end — among them my lack of output in the absence of deadlines and my complete ignorance of the basic mechanics of narrative — but especially effective was the indifference of literary magazines to the work I sent them.
Sometime between now and when I gave up on becoming a writer, the definition of the word got blurry.
Writing used to be a job that writers got paid to do by institutions such as book publishers and newspapers. Being a writer wasn’t about writing per se; it was about being published. And it was my failure to be published that convinced me that I wasn’t really a writer.
Today it’s often sufficient for a writer to be able to say that he writes and is read. “Writers write” was once the refrain of creative writing professors instilling in their students the value of constant practice in the pursuit of craft. Now it’s literally true.
As newspapers die away, it’s going to be increasingly important for writers to establish credibility based not on the publications they’ve written for but on the quality of their thought. Writers will find themselves associated with certain topics because they have something to say, not because they’ve been paid to say something.
By way of blogging, we’ve all been granted universal access to the upside of self-publishing without the garage full of butt-ugly books.
What got me thinking about this was a book coming out soon. It’s about a technology company whose devices have attained near-ubiquity in the last half-decade or so. It’s the first book-length study of this company from a major publisher and I’m eager to read it, so last week I looked up the author to see what else he’d written and what he was about as a writer. I wanted to know if the book was going to read like Fast Company or The Financial Post.
I was so disappointed with the results I decided that I needed to write this post, and that it would be unkind to disclose either his name or the title or subject of his book.
Here’s what I found:
The author’s blog goes back less than 2 years and hasn’t been updated for 2 months. Did I mention he’s supposed to have written about a technology company? And that his book is out soon?
The blog contains little more than abridged press releases from the company he’s written about. No idea what he thinks about the company’s direction or their latest offerings.
Even though he appears to have written his own Wikipedia page, there’s nothing in his bibliography suggesting he’s the right guy to be writing this book.
Where’s the passion? The obsession? Where’s the writing? Where is a reason for anyone to pay $30 for a hardcover book written by him on a subject to which he appears to be less familiar than his potential readers?
On the area of an author’s purported expertise (what is authorship of a book but a declaration of authority?) what are we, the market of his potential readers, to make of his silence?
Time for a recap of sorts as we hit our 50th post. We’ve written a great deal about books, but also about other media from film and album cover art right through to the humble business card. With more than six months under the bridge, a number of themes have emerged.
Human relationships in the 20th century were, in delicate and subtle ways, managed in part by the values we grafted onto objects produced and distributed by traditional — industrial — processes. These personal metadata were ’stowaways’. We didn’t necessarily mean to tell people about ourselves by reading Infinite Jest on the subway — but glances were stolen and judgments were made nonetheless.
These communications were essential to enable some basic interactions. Flirting. Dating. Partying. Business networking. With these incidental transmission channels closing down as we consume content in new ways, we’re going to have to renegotiate, collectively, experimentally, how we communicate. Cultural objects — business cards, book covers, shared music experiences — no longer function in the same way. What does it mean for our relationships? Will we, now, be bowling together — or bowling aloner?
And so we’ve been thinking and writing about the conversations we are now beginning to have — about how to converse.
We’ve also made at least two Lebowski references. This seems shockingly low. We promise to redress over the next 50 posts. Thanks for sticking with us.
I’ve written elsewhere of my love for the Nike+ and its exemplary use of technology as a bridge between a solitary leisure pursuit and the support offered by a network.
But I find — as I increase my workout times — that there are some significant feature gaps. While I like the ‘powersong’ feature to deliver a boost when I find myself flagging, it doesn’t quite take it to the next step. For example, if I want to change music to something more appropriate to a warm-up or a warm-down, I have to pause the workout and change the playlist.
But these things have a fairly predictable place in my routine. It should be possible for the technology to anticipate them. Just like bookclubs (real or virtual) will set landmarks for progress, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to set playlist markers. Get me to x bpm after y minutes, keep me there for z minutes, then give me a warmdown. These landmarks could be used to manage a random selection of music within nonetheless predetermined parameters.
This kind of landmarking could be helpful in all kinds of situations — workouts, parties, coitus.
But that’s really only the first step. I’d ideally want the ability to tailor my listening dynamically to my pace, location, mood, heartrate, or any number of other parameters which would increase its utility. Music at parties could change depending on the volume of the conversation, the number of participants, and the amount of alcohol thus far consumed. Think of the public safety implications.
The same is true of reading — I’m more inclined to read business books and articles on the way to work, but a novel or entertainment news on the way home (particularly on Fridays). An electronic reading device should be able to push content to me on the basis of my habits, mood, place, location, activities. In this context, having to remember to pick up a different magazine or different section of a newspaper seems just ridiculously inefficient.
In short, we’re talking about having our devices present content to us on the basis of mood, not just an aggregated taste history, or the ratings we have assigned to things.
Suppose that our interfaces could isolate trends in your reading, listening, or leisure pursuits. Suppose that iTunes Genuis or Amazon’s recommendations algorithm could give you some options:
It looks like you’ve been listening to a lot of indie guitar noise merchants recently. Would you like these kinds of recommendations to be weighted higher in your results?
You’ve rather gone off James Patterson of late. Even though you own his entire published output, would you like recommendations based on this to be fact to be downplayed?
Better yet — imagine that these engines could talk to one another.
You recently started reading a novel by Cormac McCarthy. You usually read those with folk-inflected ambient music. Perhaps you’d like to try Inland by Mark Templeton to accompany this one?
* Note: not all of these scenarios are based on personal experience.
These are, of course, exactly the kinds of things that happen in day-to-day conversations with friends. Which is why social networking stands to enrich our exposure to culture and events so significantly. In the meantime, how do shuffle and recommendations engines acquire more precise sensitivities to our desires? Landmarks, trending, and complements would be good first steps.
Why do we think we need a phone at all? It’s a vestige of a nineeenth century technology that we’ve been progressively adapting to do more and more things — take and store photos, browse the internet, store and play music. This is the anxiety that some feel about an eBook reader — where would it fit? Wouldn’t the ideal eBook reader be larger than the iPhone? When Apple’s iTablet Touch finally materializes, will it be yet another device to carry around?
How about this: the tablet lives in your bag. A bluetooth headset — working off voice navigation like an iPod shuffle — tends to your urgent phone and audio needs. If you need to do anything more complex — read a book, browse the internet, work — you reach for the tablet.
The phone is now a classic example of technology inertia. Why should anyone have to communicate by holding something next to their head?
It’s a fish/barrel/shotgun scenario, really, but a couple more examples of minor irritants that are troubling in the context of the customer expectations that digital distribution enables.
First up, this scenario became inevitable in the same moment that the “partial album” was brought into being:
We’ve written previously about the possible impact of digital distribution on the impulse purchase, and will have more to say in the future. But something else in the equation occured to me after a handful of particularly frustrating attempts to buy music online recently. Something that’s obvious but goes unstated in discussions about preserving traditional industry practices.
I was irritated a few months ago when I placed Hjaltalín’s wonderful album Sleepdrunk Seasons in my iTunes wishlist playlist, only to discover when I went back to purchase it on payday that the territorial rights had changed and it was no longer available via the Canadian store. (I was eventually able to purchase it via the record label, Kimi).
This week I have tried and failed to purchase Cliff Martinez’s beautiful score to Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris, and — astonishingly — The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.
(And if you’re looking for music which is not available on iTunes, discovering that the record label in question is a subsidiary of one of the majors is really, really bad news. Small labels appear to have discovered the benefits of having in-house mp3 stores. The majors? Not so much.)
A few years ago, this kind of thing would have been mildly irritating but not all that surprising. So your local record store was sold out or didn’t carry that particular release. That’s inconvenient — but with those cumbersome industrial production processes and a physical supply chain to negotiate, it wasn’t going to shake you up. You were used to it. You’d place a special order, order it yourself online and wait a few days, or just give up. Oh well. Nobody has a right to everything.
Nowadays, though, these oversights feel absolutely unforgivable — not least because so many of the alternatives (the secondhand stores, the large independents like Sam’s, the in depth assortment at large branches of HMV) have disappeared precisely because of the benefits promised by iTunes and its legal and illegal competitors.
This reminds me of something that Dustin Curtis wrote about recently on his amazingly attractive website. The customer experience is only as good as its weakest link. iTunes is an astonishingly good customer experience — in the context of everything that preceded it — and offers a breadth of selection unlike anything the average consumer has ever known. But when you can’t get something that should be easy — easy — it feels as if they don’t care.
And for the most part these things aren’t the fault of iTunes, Amazon, or other digital retailers. Territorial rights are a massive barrier to the promise of universal availability. But there has been a sea change, I think, in customer’s tolerance for a lack of product availability. In the past, it was possible that the retailer was trying but that they weren’t very good. This still persists with traditional retailers (Metro, I’m looking at you). But where digital product is the norm, it doesn’t feel like that’s possible. Instead, it feels like the retailer isn’t even trying — that they just don’t care. That’s a terrible, terrible face for a major retailer to show to their customers.
As industrial production and distribution processes fade as intermediate factors between content producer and content consumer, the expectations for customer service are skyrocketing. Traditional retail spaces are being redesigned around exceptional customer service rather than stack-and-sell local warehousing. This is the wrong time to be hiding behind the walls of territorial copyright, which will only make customers feel justified in acquiring product in illegal ways. For these reasons it’s encouraging to see New Zealand effectively scrap its existing copyright laws, and Australia begin to dismantle territorial copyright.
As the ebooks revolution gathers steam, this will be critical for Amazon, Shortcovers, and other contenders to bear in mind. It’s all about availability and customer service. The customer will not forgive you for slamming the door in their face. They will not wait for copyright to catch up. They will sign out of the system.
Digital distribution won’t level the playing field. It will tilt it in the customer’s favour.
Can I interest you in some slightly used veterinary supplies?
We just got back from a trip to Saluda, NC’s Coon Dog Day. While I’m trying to figure out what there is to be said about the 2 days I spent thinking nobody else was tweeting from there because I didn’t see any hits for #coondogday09 other than tweets from wifey and me, let’s consider how I can mitigate an egregious veterinary expense with the help of Twitter.
While getting our dog caught up on all the vaccinations we knew she’d need to get across the border (note: they don’t check) we took the added precaution of buying a flea & tick treatment to last the duration of our trip (note: it was a good idea). Cost: $72 for 4 individually blister-sealed doses. Each dose is good for a month.
Thing is, we were only gone for 5 days. We administered a full dose only because it seemed to be an all-or-nothing sort of deal. The other 3 in the pack are each going to expire in airtight isolation before we have occasion to use them. What to do?
I’m going to post them for sale online and list my Twitter ID along with contact info. I don’t expect anyone would buy pet medication from a total stranger (cheap as I am, not even I’d do that) but I think I might have a chance to recover a bit of my expense and spare someone else most of the cost of the meds if I open myself to a background check. I’m hoping that my 600+ tweets taken in whole or in part will give a perfect stranger sufficient confidence in my character (or at least the part that applies in matters of veterinary commerce) to take advantage of a bargain price. Good, bad, or indifferent, I’ll post the results here.
Brian Gossett’s Heist series of mixes are exactly the kind of thing content systems need to evolve to allow: a fabulous concept (who doesn’t want retro location-themed soundtracks to imaginary heist movies?), brilliant execution, and (every bit as important) gorgeous custom cover art:
I am a huge fan of heist films. They exude a sense of excitement and wonderment. The recipe for a great caper is a seemingly impossible score, specialized team members, exotic sports cars, gadgets galore, globetrotting, beautiful yet conniving women, a dash of good humor, and an impeccable musical backdrop. The latter brings us to my latest series of mixes, The Heist Series. I have chosen artists who have scored classic and modern heist films. To add color to these mixes are complimentary tracks that flavor the ambience of the narrative. Each subsequent mix to follow, will personify a city in which our fictitious caper takes place.
Cathy’s Steele’s highly exclusive In the Skin of a Lion Toronto tour (ideally with photographs and other materials provided by the City of Toronto Archives)
