From famous for 15 minutes to famous to 15,000 (or how we got from Warhol to YouTube)

Andy Warhol loved the colour silver. Is silver even a colour? Grey is a colour...silver, I would argue, is a signifier. It’s a shiny symbol, one that creates a mirror that reproduces our image...for us, for voyeurs, for optical illusions.

While recently walking the floor at a Warhol exhibit at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox it occurred to me that social media is similarly shiny, the shiny object that pulls us in with one thing, often to sell us another.  

And not unlike things silver, social media has the ability to capture the likeness of anyone its in orbit and send it out into the world, for further, yes, reflection. In so doing it makes room in popular culture for subculture.

We live in a time of brand me, in which media production, once necessarily out of the grasp of the general public, is now available to pretty much everyone, the idea that drove the creation of this blog.

When we abstract this idea, we can see the paradoxes of life imitating art and art imitating life turning into media imitating life and life imitating media.  

Just as Warhol’s work, from soup cans to celebrity portraits to films that sat on a single shot for hours detonated the walls between art, life, and media, so do the platforms and apps that have become our everyday tools, and toys. They too often get a highly polarized reception, viewed as everything from waste of time to surprisingly profound...one more interesting analogy to Warhol's moving walkway of media products and personalities.

Instead of stars – Warhol created ‘superstars’ – the paradox of the ordinary engineered as celebrity.

And at the same time, the focus of Andy’s work was often the mundane, which was, somewhat ironically, not at odds with his camera’s interest in drag queens, weirdos, freaks, and sundry attention seekers. 

The ordinary as celebrity, the celebrity as commodity. These ideas resonate strongly in today’s world of social currency as determined by number of Twitter, Instagram, and Vine followers, YouTubers with brand deals, fleeting viral video stars, and bloggers wielding influence. 

The means of production are now available for hijacking by the masses, not just those in the artistic elite such as Warhol. In these terabytes of data is a cacophony of noise, vanity, and self-expression, and just as Warhol used the denizens of the factory and they used him in an unwritten contract of mutual exploitation, we use the the platforms of the digital world and they use us.

Postscript: For those who want to dig deep into the Warhol mystique, a 4-hour documentary series, in 2 parts, is available online. Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. I've watched both and I can tell you that there are many, many worse ways to spend 4 hours.

Best Of This Blog: 2015

Tis the season to look back at the year that was, and for many that may also mean asking ‘what was I thinking?’. 

Actually, I have a pretty good idea what I was thinking this past year, because a good portion of it has been captured here on the blog.

And what a year it was. 2015 was the year this blog broke 100,000 page views, a milestone I could never have imagined when I started this experiment of thinking made visible just under 3 years ago. 2015 was also the year I started teaching at York University and the year I returned to Austin, Texas for SXSW after a gap of 17 years. Not coincidentally, both of these events play a role in the ‘Best of this Blog 2015’ list that is the point of this entry. So let’s get down to business and crunch the year-end blog stats, not audited by Price Waterhouse Coopers (you’ll just have to trust me), and look back at the year’s most popular posts. And because I believe in delivering just a little extra to readers of this blog, I’m not serving up a Top 5 of the year, but a Top 6. Let's get this party started.

#6:

One of a handful of posts I wrote about YouTubers, those new faces of the Internet famous. In the early days of YouTube it was anti-heroes and weirdos with one-off videos gaining popularity in the then new, non-broadcast realm. But YouTube is now ten years old, and as is the case with so many things as they get older, to a sizable extent the weird is being supplanted by the commercially friendly on the video free-for-all that is YouTube. In this post we took a look at some popular YouTubers in 2015 and find out that building personal brand is now as big a part of the game as the provision of online content.

#5:

This one is a post that originated in a bit of classroom kerfuffle, when debate broke out during a session I was teaching on the impact of digital technologies on the creative industries. What happens when disintermediation gets dissed? Find out by clicking here.

#4:

Here we have a post – one of two on this list -- that comes from conference sessions I attended at SXSW Interactive in Austin in March 2015. This one is the story of Buzzfeed, truly a media company for the 21^st century. Their content gets about 5 billion views per month, and 95% of those views come not from their own website, but on OPP (other people’s platforms). See the whole post on Buzzfeed and the wisdom of decentralized media here.

#3:

Coming in at the third most popular post of the year it’s Tai Lopez. Who? You know, this guy:

And be honest, who among us didn’t encounter this ‘get rich like me’ pitchman this past year, barging onto our screens as we tried to watch videos on YouTube. And as annoying as he was, the guy had an ineffable something. Blog readers seemed to agree. To read this year's third most popular post, about the man who reimagined the infomercial for the YouTube era, click here.

#2:

Now it’s time for the runner up, and it’s the story of platform capitalism, the concept that explains how companies like Uber and AirBnB can be worth billions, without owning a darn thing. For the full post on platform capitalism aka why your parents don’t understand the Internet, aka the WTF economy, click here.

And now, the most popular post of the year, one that also originated at SXSW Interactive 2015.

This widely shared post looks at the shift in PBS’ strategy from owned and operated to distributed media, a hallmark of this era of attention trumping brand, broadcaster, and many of the other logics of the old media world.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/07/18/looking-back-on-a-year-of-pbs-digital-studios/

Where attention goes first is where the content follows. And it's not just digital native companies like Buzzfeed that get this, but also traditional broadcasters like PBS. Read the full post here.

And there you have it, the top posts of the year here on the Demassed blog. Thank you, as always, for your clicks, thumbs ups, and assorted endorsements of this blog. I’m undecided as to how things will take shape in 2016, now that I’ve written well over 100,000 words on the topic of digital disintermediation and the creative industries, and technologies, form factors, and marketplaces continue to evolve, but stay tuned. Like they say on the big box, more news as it happens.

When media is everywhere where are we?

There used to be this thing called media, that happened on fairly expensive, unwieldy equipment, almost always kept indoors, and created by an elite group of people that presumably knew better than the rest of us. It was transmitted to us at first be relatively few channels, later by too many, and still it seemed there was never anything on we wanted to watch.

Today there’s this thing called media that still resides in our homes but it also resides in our workplaces, in our social spaces, and in the palms of our hands, where, each year, increasing amounts of it are created and consumed.

This means many things, some culturally significant, others entertaining or bad for our health. Or both. For example, thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices we (or is it just me?) often find ourselves annoyed in public spaces, at stores, and on transit; all because some people don’t consider that the world does not want to be privy to their extended conversations.  

Chiropractors of the world may rejoice, but many of us suffer from, or are apparently about to suffer from, ‘text neck’. 

And otherwise (presumably) rational people are succumbing to face plants in conspicuous places.

But beyond the ubiquity of communication – and the psychological and physical discomfort noted above – what are the ways in which we can better understand the effects of mobile media in relation to our environment?

Seeing that it’s the holiday season, the Demassed blog is offering up a platter of miniature cognitive sandwiches in the form of some issues on this topic that were recently discussed by the group assembled for the Monday night seminars, a tradition started by pioneering media theorist Marshall McLuhan during his teaching days at the University of Toronto. 

The topic on the table was: In the mobile world is there a sense of place?  Taking it on were:

• Journalist Sean Silcoff, author of “Losing The Signal”, about the spectacular rise and fall of Blackberry 
• Colin Ellard, cognitive neuroscientist  
• Luigi Ferrara of the Institute Without Boundaries 

Some thought starters were introduced to frame the discussion:

The concept of acoustic space: A space with no centre, no front, characterized by an “all-at-once-ness”, in the parlance of McLuhan himself.

The work of theorist Joshua Meyrowitz, who, 30 years ago, wrote an incredibly forward looking book on the impact of electronic media on our behaviour called "No Sense Of Place", introducing such ideas as the blurring of public and private experiences and the creation and merging of new identities created through our exposure to broadcast media. Bold thoughts indeed for 1985, and definitely following in the footsteps of McLuhan’s work on concepts such as the de-tribalizing effects of media; e.g. the printed word took us away from our ‘tribes’ because we could consume information privately, in isolation, away from our communities. Similarly, broadcast media has the power to re-tribalize disparate, large groups of people, on the basis that they are exposed to similar cultural expressions and norms. In other words, looking at our relationships with the world as media-ted.

The question of the evening was then posed: In the mobile world is there a sense of place? The discussion went on for an hour or so but in the name of brevity I'll bring you a handful of highlights.

Ferrara of the Institute Without Boundaries urged us think about, for example, big box retail as a response to the end of the physical world we once knew. It may be that mobile, rather than creating placelessness, allows the injection of place into everything. We are nomads and every place is part of our life as we move through it. Placelessness = industrial society and we are now post-industrial.

Cognitive Neuroscientist Ellard pointed out that the hardware in our brain wants to recognize particular places. Mobile devices intensify our sense of place; a new kind of awareness results. We now carry media-ting devices and the ability to insert and extract information on the go. This adds place-ful-ness to what otherwise might be placelessness.

Journalist and author Silcoff put it this way: We’re all armed with digital Swiss army knives, so how does this change our relationship to the world? Possibly by what we no longer have, such as the disappearance of things like the banks on the corner, that at one time were some of the grandest architecture in our everyday environments.  Instead we get decentralized, specialized cityscapes. Kids find their place in this world early, via screen time. Note that many of the younger generation don’t know how to use a paper map, because digital maps bring the world to wherever the user is and zero in on that location accordingly, whereas paper maps require the user to find his/her place in the larger landscape. 

Such inversions of context and power structures are typical of the Gutenberg revolution, as well as such McLuhan-inspired ideas as 'we shape our tools and then our tools shape us'.

Related Posts:

McLuhan's 'Understanding Media' 50 Years Later

The perpetual now and the authority of everyone

The 'everyday experts' taking over YouTube

It's time for Part 2 of my coverage of the gathering of YouTube celebs and enthusiasts known as Buffer Festival. (See Part 1 here.)

In this instalment you'll meet a trio of YouTubers who started out as 1-man / 1-woman operations and now net from several thousand to several million views per day each.

Treading on what was once the exclusive domain of public broadcasting, YouTubers Craig Benzine, Dianna Cowern and Matt Santoro all started uploading videos for nothing more than the heck of it.  Read more here.

YouTuber Matt Santoro asks questions millions want the answers to

How bloggers with selfie sticks became brand allies

Where industry once created stars, now it often follows, as is the case with the people-powered celebs of the Internet who are then pursued by broadcasters, movie studios, book publishers, and brands.

Click here for the blog post I wrote on the topic, featuring an interview with Corey Vidal, founder of Buffer Festival, an annual conference, get together, and fan event for YouTubers...and the people who love them.

Corey Vidal, 3rd from left, holds court with assorted stars of the YouTube small screen at Buffer Festival
source:www.bufferfestival.com

Related Posts:
The Everyday Experts Taking Over YouTube

Hooked on Addiction?

Like many people, I, at one time, had an addiction to the TV show Intervention. I took my first hit quite by accident. It was while channel surfing one night ten years ago and this guy, Gabe the gambler, appeared on my screen. How the heck could I not be transfixed. This kind of stuff was simply not show on television back then.

10 years later Transfixed would be the name given to a symposium that accompanied the Rendezvous With Madness film festival, currently in progress in Toronto. Both festival and symposium are devoted to the (un?)holy trinity of mental health, addictions, and their depictions in the media.  

I was so there.

The symposium was a day long panel event, but in reality more like a live talk show, where discussants and audience members were able to take in the frankly quite harrowing tales of addiction from people ranging from a one-time NHL star to a punk rock icon, and to do so alongside mental health professionals and media studies professors. If that doesn’t hit all the buttons, I don’t know what does.

Source: www.rendezvouswithmadness.com

The narratives of despair and despondency speak for themselves; though, as one panelist noted, their over-availability in the media can turn them into a perverse form of entertainment, as opposed to cautionary tales.

Having the media studies interest/bias that I do, I wanted to share a few highlights from the day’s discussions. Some truly penetrating insights were shared around the collision of a 24/7 media and technology-enabled world and portrayals of addiction -- whether they originate from fictional shows or movies or from reality TV.

Referencing academic work on the topic of ‘subalterns’, or those who exists outside the domains of conventional power structures, Scott Henderson, a professor at Brock University, spoke of the concept of immediacy, of everything being at our fingertips at all times. Immediacy, said Henderson, used to be the domain of the marginalized, pointing out that those with status or privilege pursued the stable, not the unknown. Immediacy and notions of taste were once at cross-purposes with each other.

Henderson also made an astute observation about auto-play as now being a default setting on YouTube and Netflix – that’s when the videos or shows just keep on going, unless you actually budget from the couch and do something to stop the process. What this does, as Henderson noted, is create a media environment with no beginning or end. It’s an ongoing carousel of programming in which we are constantly tempted by the allure of a better ‘something else’. As a result, it is not unusual for people to spend an entire evening clicking everything but watching nothing.  More choice doesn’t have to necessarily mean less control, of course, but the behaviour that many of us are engaging in is undeniable.

Ken Rogers, a faculty member at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, spends a lot of time thinking about the relationship between media formats and their effect on our attention. Heck, he’s written a book on the topic. Rogers drew an interesting analogy between our use of media products and the pharmaceutical industry, where the same drug -- particularly in the case of opiates -- that is the cure can also be the culprit.

The difference, then, is the context of consumption. He went on to talk about freemium games, which are online games you can play for free, and then opt to buy additional tools and widgets to enhance your game play. If you’ve ever been pulled in by more rounds than you had expected of Angry Birds, Farmville, or Candy Crush you are likely nodding in agreement, acknowledging the slippery slope between playing a game, and having it play you. 

If this is sounding foreign to you it may be worth considering this thing called ‘the grind’, which is central to the design of many video games. The idea is that the flow of the game play is structured so that events happen that provide our brains with jolts of dopamine, so that we not only keep playing, but that we want to step up the level of game play, which is only possible, of course, by buying the additional tools or ‘lives’, so you can keep on slingshotting rocks at birds or obsessively lining up chocolate squares on your screen.

As Rogers put it, we think of attention as something that we own, that is ours, when in fact it is something that is transactional. We trade it for other things, and ideally the trade-off is a deal that is good for us, but as is the case with most deals, caveat emptor.

The 3rd wave of podcasting & how we got here

It is “raucous and…conversationally rich…and stupidly comforting”, wrote Nicholas Quah, describing the singular nature of podcasts in HotPod, his newsletter on the dramatic changes taking place in the world of direct to listener audio production aka podcasting.

And it is now into its third wave, according to people who got their feet wet during wave one of the podcast revolution. 

We'll hear from a group of these early waders shortly, but first a quick surf through the chronology of the audio format that broke free from the confines of broadcasting formats and the things with knobs we came to know in our homes, cars, and workplaces.

2003- 2008

Wave 1.0

The pioneers doing the homesteading, without much in the way of commercial intentions or aspirations. Apple incorporates a podcasting platform into iTunes midway through 2005, making it a built in feature for the at first tens of millions, then later hundreds of millions, of iPods in circulation. During this period the first iPhone was released (June 2007), creating another ‘baked in’ environment for podcast distribution and consumption.

2008 - 2014

Wave 2.0

Apple launches app store (2008), the superstars-to-be of podcasting start podcasting, e.g. Marc Maron, Adam Carolla, Joe Rogan (2009), the number of podcasts produced doubles during this period, and mobile phone penetration triples.

2014 –  ? 

Wave 3.0

Serial – the most listened to podcast in history, breaks the record for fastest time to five million downloads and leads to the public perception that 2014 is the year podcasting broke. The ecosystem of devices, creators, listeners, apps, distribution platforms, discovery via recommendation, sharing, and/or reviews reaches a point of maturity. 

It should come as no surprise then, that podcasting was recently given a forensic, this-is-your-life treatment at an event called State of the Podcast 2015, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, MA.

A panel comprised of esteemed podcasting pioneers and practitioners, and moderated by Harvard Law School clinical professor Chris Bavitz went back in time to recall the early days of the technology, and the form, and went on to share their views on where things are likely to go from here.

The panelists: Broadcaster and Podcaster Christopher Lydon, Kerri Hoffman and Jake Shapiro of PRX, and Benjamen Walker host of Theory of Everything Podcast. The discussion went kind of like this:

Christopher Lydon:

In 2003 blogging was the first run of the podcast world; it had all the “crackle & pop of media” but with added enthusiasm and openness. Dave Winer, credited with inventing blogging, thought what the world needs is an MP3 that can be syndicated, and the result was the first podcast, that I hosted in 2003.

It coincided with the beginning of the war on Iraq, when 70% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. The New York Times should have been running banner headlines, but it was bloggers and podcasters saying things no one else was. 

It was the restoring of public conversation that had become dilapidated, and this became a place to have a reasonable conversation.

Benjamen Walker:

Between around 2004 and 2006 there was a lot of excitement in the field --  and lots of gigs as ‘podcast consultant'. Then came the dead time, and now it’s the time of hype, with the money trucks dumping money everywhere, but I think that rather than focusing on that we should be thinking about what comes next.

The term 'podcasting' hits peak Google circa 2006

Jake Shapiro:

PRX (Public Radio Exchange, an online distribution platform for digital audio and radio programs) was launched in Fall 2003. RSS for audio seemed like a silly, trivial thing at that time.

Odeo, a podcasting platform founded in 2005, was the first interesting startup in the area (started by ex Google employee Evan Williams). 

Ed. Note: And from the ashes of Odeo came a messaging app, first called Twttr. You probably know it by its more fully voweled name.

That same year Apple caught on to the surge of interest in podcasting (leading to the demise of Odeo) and incorporated a podcasting platform into iTunes. This also built the technology into the 30 million iPods that were then out there, a number that would reach 400 million by the end of 2014.

The second wave of podcasting was accidentally triggered by Apple, with the launch of the app store and the iPhone. People realized ‘these aren’t just smartphones…these are radios!’ Audio had been a bad fit for the web, but mobile could fix this, and mobile has become the way for billions of devices to become a listening platform for audio.

Kerri Hoffman:

In 2003 we had a tagline we used for PRX: "Making public radio more public". It was a moment of having direct to consumer consumption of media, news, stories, investigations – it’s what podcasts have enabled

In 2014 we launched the Radiotopia network, to build a platform for talent, people like Ben (Walker), and to consolidate the back office, things like marketing, cross-promotion, and sales. Within 2 years we’ve increased our growth by tenfold. This tells us a lot about the public’s interest in consuming this kind of content, about the ubiquity of the technology, and that the shows can survive. For a long time shows would get to a certain size and then plateau. That’s why this is an exciting time for what comes next.

Benjamen Walker:

Thinking about the waves of podcasting -- I see it more as a Rashomon narrative -- all 3 happening at the same time: The technology story, with Dave Winer and RSS, the money story, in which Roman Mars hijacks public radio model with his Kickstarter for 99% Invisible, and now the art form story.            

I think people that are making a lot of the great podcasts are people who left public radio because they could do more on the outside than the inside; so I feel like public radio isn’t taking the risks they once did.

I teach a podcasting course at a university in NYC and it’s interesting…none of the students want a job in public radio – they want to be the next Roman Mars. They want to do their own podcasts.

Kerri Hoffman:

The risk point is a good one. Part of the future will be a lot more experimentation, a lot more fails – and that’s not something that public radio is accustomed to. By the the time they launch a show they’ve done a million polls and pilots. In podcasting, where it’s digital only, a network effect of like-minded shows and talent is what’s going to get the lift.

Moderator Chris Bavitz: 

Are podcasters now playing more to advertisers? Is it becoming a more commercial medium?

Kerri Hoffman:

The producers we work with can always say no to advertisers. What advertisers are waking up to is that listeners are selecting, they’re subscribing…they’re a more dedicated fan base, and the advertisers are waking up to that reality. Since we work in both broadcast and podcast we’ve seen a shift of some of the dollars from the broadcast to the podcast side…and that wasn’t happening even 2 to 3 years ago.

Benjamen Walker:

Advertisers jumping on the hype train can benefit us all. The discovery piece is so hard, with so many podcasts out there – some people hear an ad, according to research, and think ‘oh, ok, this is a good podcast'...because it has ads on it.

Kerri Hoffman:

The power of the micro donation (associated with podcasts) is a new thing, compared to the public radio philanthropist, who you want to mature with you. With podcasts people give 5 dollars or 10 dollars just because they’re in a moment…all of that has really changed; that’s against standard fundraising practices.

Jake Shapiro: 

Podcasting can transcend its public radio origins…the content, the technology, everything – the dominant white male techie crowd. We can now move beyond the constraints of the world of broadcasting. PRX was born out of public radio institutions but to bridge the gap to something new. We don’t have a tower, we’re built digital, for the web, but we still distribute broadcast shows (e.g. The Moth).

We offer a platform, a back office, and it’s an opportunity to incubate new shows. For example Radiolab started as something that was done after hours at WNYC. 

Part of the joy of the Internet is to match passions to people. You don’t need to reach a million people. You can do things that are really good and that are designed for small audience.

Bonus Feature!

Click here for an interactive history of podcasting timeline