Deep Media

More on the future of books: Neil Gaiman at the LBF

Not long after the If Book Then conference in Milan and Stockholm, Neil Gaiman gave a much-talked-about keynote at the London Book Fair in which he too talked about the future of books. Speaking to the international publishing establishment, he made a point that was both familiar and critically important: Change is here, and denial is pointless. "I worry that too many of us . . . are certain that if only we can get 1993 to come back again, we'll clean up. That if we hold our breath and close our eyes and guard the gates with bigger and more dangerous weapons, time will turn backwards and it will be yesterday again. And we all knew what the rules were yesterday. The rules of publishing were simple. Authors, agents, books, incredibly long lunches—that was publishing. Not any more." 

Along the way, however, he gave some tantalizing glimpses of what the future could hold. Some were quite basic: the idea that buying a physical book might automatically give you the ebook and audiobook as well. Others were counterintuitive in the same way that the study I designed with JWT was counterintuitive: "I suspect that one of the things we should definitely be doing . . . is making books that are prettier and finer and better. We should be fetishizing objects. We should be giving people a reason to buy objects, not just content, if we want to sell them objects." 

The most intriguing thing he men­tioned, however, was These Pages Fall Like Ash—"a story told across two books," one hand-made and beautiful, the other consisting of digital text on hard drives hidden across the city of Bristol. Together the two books will tell the story of two cities that overlap, "ex­isting in the same space and time but una­ware of each other until now." The people finding the digital version will themselves be­come part of the story. 

These Pages Fall Like Ash is one of several innovative publishing projects under­taken by Books&Print Sandbox, a pro­duction of iShed, the digital arm of Bris­tol's culturally adventurous Watershed media center. The experience—put together by Tom Abba of the University of the West of England and the artists' collective Circumstance, with contributions from Neil and from the novelist Nick Harkaway—begins tomorrow, Saturday, at the Watershed complex in Bristol's Harbourside area. Picking up the hand-made notebook at Watershed, you set off on the narrative journey. It's a perfect example of what can be achieved by combining the digital with the physical: As Neil observed in his talk, "You're creating something that would literally have been unimaginable." 

If Book Then . . . what now? Books face the future

What's a book, anyway? The answer used to be simple: two covers, a lot of words in between, printed on paper and meant to be stored on shelves. Not any more. With ebooks the paper is gone, the covers are vestigial, the shelves are virtual, and the words might be joined by playable videos, expandable photos, interactive graphics, and HTML5 pyrotechnics. The question is not what a book is but what it can be. 

So it was gratifying to spend a couple of days re­cently with people who have smart ideas about this. With The Art of Immersion just published in Italian, I was invited to Europe to speak at IfBookThen, a future-of-books confer­ence staged in Milan by the Italian e-publisher BookRepublic and reprised two days later in Stock­holm by Publit, its Swedish counterpart. Here's what I came away with. 

1. Books are data.

As trade journalist Edward Nowatka pointed out, Amazon's Kindle is essentially a data-collection device—one that tracks your bookmarks, highlights, notes, and annotations, not to mention the last page you read. Because they go through third-party retailers, most publishers don't have access to anything resembling this kind of information. But what if they did? Nick Sidwell of Guardian Books made a convincing case for using it to inform decisions about what gets published. 

"Embracing Analog" at SXSW: What the growing fascination with the physical means for marketers*

*and everyone else  

For this year's SXSW, I worked with the ad agency JWT to devise a survey that would get at what seems an increasingly key question: How do we feel about items in the physical world—books, newspapers, magazines, records, mail—that are rapidly being made obsolete by their digital counterparts? A few years ago, the response in most of the wired world would probably have been, "good riddance." But in talking with people I knew in their 20s and 30s, it was becoming apparent that this wasn't their reaction at all. More and more they seemed to echo Scott Lindenbaum, the 30-year-old cofounder of SPUN, who said to me one day last year as we were talking about music, “Certain objects have memories. In 20 years, I want a token that I enjoyed this album in 2012. I’d hate to have to tell my son, ‘Here’s my hard drive.’”

Is digital supremacy really going into abeyance? Without further evidence, it was hard to say if this attitude extended beyond the reach of the L train. But JWT Intelligence, the agency's research and trendspotting unit, had just listed "Objectifying Objects"—the idea that as objects dematerialize, "people are fetishizing the physical and the tactile"—among its key trends for the year. And the surprise popularity of out-of-bounds theatrical experiences like Punchdrunk's Sleep No More certainly suggests that immersive entertainment does not have to be digital to be exciting. So I met with the director of JWT Intelligence, Ann Mack, and we decided to collaborate on a survey that would explore the issue further. For the next few months we worked with other people at the agency—in particular Marian Berelowitz, from Ann's group, and Mark Truss, JWT's director of brand intelligence—to decide what to ask and how best to proceed. 

The poll was conducted in early February using a statistically representative sample of 800 adults (18+) in the US and 400 in the UK. Earlier this week, JWT released the results in a trend report that's available online. Meanwhile, Ann and I presented the results from the US poll at SXSW with Paul Woolmington, founding partner of Naked Communications Americas. Here are a few highlights from that session.

Data dump: Unlike Facebook—or tax it?

Douglas Rushkoff's announcement earlier this week that he was quitting Facebook happened to coincide with a major New York Times story about a new French proposal to levy a tax on online data collection. The connection? Both raise an issue that's key to the future of the Internet: Who owns the data we users leave online? Us, or the companies that harvest it in return for all those free services they provide? 

So far, the answer is obvious. But both Rush­koff and Nicolas Colin, a former entre­pre­neur who's co-author of the French tax pro­posal, are arguing in their separate ways that that's not how it ought to be. 

Rushkoff is the rare thinker who is re­freshingly clear-headed at the same time that he's assertive almost to the point of com­bativeness. His latest book, Present Shock, due out March 21 from Current, argues that we've moved beyond futurism to something he calls "presentism": Caught in the rushing river of realtime, we struggle to stay afloat. In a post earlier this week, he announced that in his own attempt to do so, he was quitting Facebook 

. . . because my participation on the site is simply too inconsistent with the values I espouse in my work. In my upcoming book . . . I argue—as—I always have—for engaging with technology as conscious human beings, and dispensing with tech­nologies that take that agency away.

Facebook is just such a technology. It does things on our behalf when we're not even there. It actively misrepresents us to our friends, and—worse—misrep­resents those who have befriended us to still others. To enable this dysfunctional situation—I call it “digiphrenia”—would be at the very least hypocritical. But to participate on Facebook as an author, in a way specifically intended to draw out the "likes" and resulting vulnerability of others, is untenable.

Facebook has a long history of questionable behavior toward its users, but the policy Rushkoff describes is particularly egregious. As outlined last month in a post on Forbes.com, the company has decided not only to use your likes in its new Graph Search feature but to recycle old likes and tie them to new, "related posts" that turn up in in your friends' newsfeeds. These related posts go up without your knowledge, permission, or control—as evidenced by a Minneapolis software developer who reported on his own blog, "I’m only familiar with this issue because a friend asked if I liked 'penis shaped waffles.'"

Seriously? Penis-shaped waffles? 

Henry Jenkins on 'Spreadable Media': How Web 2.0 went wrong, why 'viral' sucks, and the UGC problem

Last week, in part one of my interview with Henry Jenkins, we talked about how he and his coauthors came to write Spreadable Media and what it means that the "participatory culture" of the Web focuses so much of its attention on broadcast properties like Lost or, more recently, The Walking Dead. Today, in part two, Henry takes on some of the basic metaphors we use to describe the things we do online. 

In the book, you argue that a number of the terms we've used for years to talk about Internet-related activities are in fact misleading and outright damaging. You object in particular to the infection metaphor of phrases like "going viral." Does this really damage the idea of participatory culture? 

A key assumption in this book is that words matter, that the metaphors we use shape the assumptions we make and thus the actions we take, all the more so in the context of an emerging and still ill-defined phenomenon. We argue that the term "viral media" consistently strips agency from the participants within networks of circulation. Infection metaphors lead many to think of those who spread videos as the "unknowing hosts" who are acting "irrationally," and we think of the content as somehow "self-replicating."

Henry Jenkins on 'Spreadable Media,' why fans rule, and how 'The Walking Dead' takes on a life of its own

"If it doesn't spread, it's dead": With this pithy dictum, Henry Jenkins summed up the nature of media distribution in the Internet age. Introduced as "our new mantra" in a 2007 blog post about Jonathan Lethem and slash fiction, it turned up again as the title of a 2008 white paper from the Convergence Culture Consortium, the initiative Henry launched at MIT to explore the changing dynamics of the media industry. Now it's the central idea that animates Spreadable Media, the new book he's written with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, two former C3 colleagues who have moved on to consultancy roles — Sam at Peppercomm Strategic Communications, Joshua at Undercurrent. In whatever context, this idea stands as a corrective to the distribution model of the broadcast era, which presumes that control will rest with whoever puts the product out, not with the people who are the market for it. The levers of power have shifted. 

Due out next week from NYU Press, Spreadable Media is an essential read for anyone who wants to under­stand how media works today. The book begins by contrasting spreadability with stickiness, an earlier measure of online appeal that prevailed during the heyday of "Web portals" like AOL and Yahoo! Stickiness was a Web 1.0 concept that tried to port ideas from the broadcast industry into the Web world — ideas like cen­tralization and pull and pre-structured interactivity, as opposed to dis­persal and flow and open-ended participation. But the authors take issue with Web 2.0 as well, and they seem border­line appalled by the "viral" metaphor that has attached itself to the act of online sharing. Participation, they argue, is not a disease, and should not be treated like one. To do so is to denigrate not just the act but the peo­ple who doing it — that is, us. 

Henry and I have known each other for sev­eral years—I've spoken to his class at USC, and he interviewed me when The Art of Immersion came out. So with Spreadable Media now available for pre-order, I was eager to return the favor. Here's part one of our email exchange: 

When you coined the phrase "participatory culture" in 1992, did you have any idea how participatory it would get? 

I never would have imagined it, to be honest. My understanding of the concept has deepened over time. In 1992, I used "participatory culture" as the subtitle of my book, Textual Poachers, which just came out in a 20th anniversary edition. I was trying to set up a basic contrast between the ways that mass media had created a spectator culture and the ways that fandom was asserting a collective and individual right to participate within media culture, often through the production of new kinds of works — fan fiction primarily, but also fan music and fan video — from the raw materials that the culture industry provided. My thinking at the time was informed by writers like Seymour Papert, who had described the forms of cultural participation which had grown up around the Samba Schools in Brazil, but my thinking lacked much cultural scope or depth.

"Nightmare High": The BAFTA-winning game that gets you through your worst day of school—ever

We all have our bad days — but some bad days are way worse than others. And it's hard to get worse than a first day at school that goes totally, horribly, mind-bendingly wrong. So how do you put such an experience behind you? That's the question that provoked Nightmare High, an online game for pre-teens that recently took home an interactive children's award from BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Developed for the independent UK broadcaster Channel 4 by Somethin' Else, a highly regarded London production company, Nightmare High is inhabited by the likes of Mr. Piltdown, the criminally boring physics teacher, and Liam Bastin, the school bully even the teachers are afraid of. You start out on your first day of secondary school with the best of intentions — but by the end of the day your gym uniform has been tossed out the window, the teacher has made you wear a leotard instead, a fellow student has recorded it on all on video and posted it to YouTube, and you've become the laughingstock not just of your new school but of the entire nation. At which point, reality cracks wide open — and now you've got to pull it together again. Good luck. 

The Colbert Super PAC: Magic Happens!

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Among the immersive media experiences we spotlighted at SXSW's Immersion 101 discussion last spring was Stephen Colbert's faux presidential campaign, which started on The Colbert Report and grew to include not only stump speeches but the formation of an actual Super PAC. Launched in response to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which struck down government-imposed limits on "independent" political spending by corporations and the like as an affront to free speech, the Colbert Super PAC was no joke. Through an outrageous series of segments on his Comedy Central show, Colbert and his attorney, former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter, demonstrated just how ridiculous—and appalling—the rules on Super PACs are. A couple of weeks after SXSW, Colbert's Super PAC—Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which by that point had raised more that $1 million—won a Peabody Award, one of America's top prizes in journalism. “What an honor! I am truly speechless. Luckily, thanks to Citizens United, my money can speak for me,” Colbert tweeted in response. 

Now, of course, the campaign is over, the big money lost, and Colbert's lust for power has abated. But not, apparently, his appetite for money. Last night, in a final demonstration of the kind of abuses the Super PAC regulations permit, Potter told Colbert how to dispose of the fund's remaining $800,000 in a way that would make him very, very happy. For anybody with leftover campaign dollars out there, this video is highly instructive. 

And the future of storytelling is . . .

Okay, I give up—what is the future of storytelling? Last Friday's Future of Storytelling conference, held in a tranquil and seldom-visited corner of New York City, didn't offer a big reveal, but it did provide a high-level forum for exploration, contemplation, and debate. In the process it high­lighted two radically different visions—along with a third factor, too seldom appreciated, that's critical no matter what future we end up with. 

Organized by Charlie Melcher of Melcher Media, the innovative publisher behind Al Gore's Our Choice, the one-day conference began with a chartered ferry ride from lower Manhattan past the Statue of Liberty to the north shore of Staten Island. There, on the bucolic grounds of Sailors Snug Harbor, a 19th-century home for retired mariners that's been redeveloped as a cultural center, a variety of scenarios for storytelling's future unfolded. 

Future #1: Bots will do it. 

The day was organized around a series of workshops and roundtable discussions led by such people as Damian Kulash of OK Go, Heroes creator Tim Kring, Ian Schafer of the digital agency Deep Focus, and Google's Aaron Koblin, the man behind the pioneering interactive video The Wilderness Downtown. But first we all gathered in Snug Harbor's 1892 Music Hall for a welcome from Charlie and a few talks—the last of which, by Kris Hammond of the digital storytelling startup Narrative Science, posited that stories in the future will be told by bots.  

SocialSamba's Aaron Williams on Hashtag Killer and why you might want to friend those guys on "Psych"

For all the buzz this year about social TV, it's mainly been about connecting fans with fans—which is nice as far as it goes, but that's not terribly far. What if you could jump the fiction-reality barrier and connect fans with characters? Then it might start to get interesting. 

That's what Aaron Williams and Mat­thew Shilts figured when they started SocialSamba, a not-quite-two-year-old com­pany that works with television net­works and producers to bridge the gap, or at least blur it a bit. SocialSamba has partnered with MTV, USA Network, War­ner Bros., and others to enable fans to connect with TV and movie characters through scripted interactions. 

After experimenting with a "tweetcast" for USA's Covert Affairs, SocialSamba found a winner in Hashtag Killer. Crafted for USA's hit show Psych and launched at the start of the show's sixth season last fall, it's a seven-week game that lets you work with Gus and his psychic partner Shawn to track down a serial killer. Last spring, USA's senior VP of digital, Jesse Redniss, reported that Hashtag Killer had engaged some 400,000 players (roughly one-ninth of Psych's total viewership) and created more than 80 million impressions on Facebook and Twitter. 

Williams, a former SAP executive who lives in Silicon Valley, and Shilts, his Minneapolis-based CTO, were up for an Emmy for original interactive television programming for Hashtag Killer. (The Emmy, announced last Saturday with the other creative arts awards, went to Fourth Wall Studios for Dirty Work, an original series for Rides TV.) Earlier this week I put a few questions to Aaron by email. Anything more you'd like to know? Ask and I'll follow up.