[ image courtesy hugh ]
On-demand programming is ace. I love iPlayer (especially now I can access it on our Wii), 4OD, Apple TV, Virgin Media On Demand and so on. I can’t wait for Hulu and Boxee to come to the UK, and the (eventual) launch of the long-awaited Project Canvas. We get to watch what we want, when we want, personalised to our own tastes. Brilliant.
But one of the more interesting debates around the shift towards on-demand is around the thorny issue of public service programming and content. It used to be (and still, in the main, is) public service broadcasting, but now of course it’s not just a case of mass national broadcast.
And of course content – public service or otherwise – takes many forms. We consume content in myriad ways, with an ever expanding choice of outlets to satisfy our desires. But when we choose to consume what we want, when we want, we’re by definition playing to our own personal biases – our cultural choices are dictated and shaped by our own experiences, tastes and points of view. And we usually choose to consume content that satisfies these cultural mores. And more often than not, that’s content that chimes with our own personal perspectives and opinions.
I recently listened to the Episode 7 of the fabulous Shift Run Stop podcast from the ingenious and supremely talented Leila Johnston and Roo Reynolds, featuring a fascinating interview with Adam Curtis (of The Power of Nightmares and It Felt Like a Kiss fame). I’d recommend the series generally if you like geek culture, games, comedy and the like, but even if that’s not really your thing, I’d definitely recommend this particular episode for Adam Curtis’ provocative points of view.
He touches on his disenchantment with our fascination with recombinant culture, bemoaning the observation that in our endless remixing of the past, we’re failing to make cultural progress and come up with anything entirely new (although it’s worth pointing out that he also charges himself as guilty) – and that it’s symptomatic of a larger societal malaise and lack of progress, and a sense that we’re simply standing still.
Roo brought up Jane McGonigal’s World Without Oil – an ARG designed to tackle the very real-world problem of oil dependency (funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) – as an example of a new form of cultural content designed to forge genuine progress. Curtis responded that actually this wasn’t anything groundbreaking, that there were people in the 70s who tried to imagine what a life without oil would be like, and they were called hippies, who went to live in Buckminster Fuller domes to explore a different way of life, which wasn’t dependent on oil. The point he made was that the 70s hippies carried out their lifestyle experiment, but never “worked out how to challenge the the structure of power to change the world to get what they wanted” – their experiments quite literally took place in a bubble, with little effect on wider society. And that the kind of people playing a World Without Oil were likely to be people who were already interested in exploring the issues in question – and that it was preaching to the converted.
Whether or not you agree with his view is academic: for my money the most salient observation that Curtis made was that if you want to change the world, you have to change how other people think who don’t necessarily share your beliefs – and our own views are continually being reinforced because cultural content is being divided and subdivided so that it’s only playing to people who already believe in what you’re saying.
Being able to consume the content we want, when we want, how we want is great – except that unless we actively seek out the unknown, we’re less likely to end up seeing, hearing or experiencing the unexpected. Which is a shame from an individual perspective of experiencing culture, but also potentially damaging from the perspective of a well-informed and progressive citizenry.
Curtis said that he came into the world of broadcast TV because he wanted the opportunity to get his point across to people who didn’t already agree with him. I don’t know that simply maintaining public service broadcasting is enough to break out of the echo chamber – the array of content available is so extensive that even if broadcast TV has the potential to reach the masses, there’s less likelihood that they’ll be watching (see the 2009 Ofcom PSB report).
I personally don’t agree with Curtis’ view that intiatives like World Without Oil are simply “playing in the sandbox” (his words, not mine) – and I believe that game based learning will continue to be a crucial tool to educate, inform and encourage behaviour change. But the underlying issue is a fascinating, and scary, conundrum – how do we encourage people to choose to consume content that they might not agree with. How do we break out of our echo-chamber?
Thanks very much for the mention Katy, really glad you found Adam stimulating and the things you say above are very interesting and very true, I think.
Look forward to meeting you properly soon!
mmm, interesting. by extension, on-demand might call for a redefining of the way we treat tv programmes as social objects. if we’re not all sat there watching the same stuff, we can’t all catch up around the water cooler the next day to gossip/enthuse/bitch about it.
which maybe means it’s all the more important that public-service content has more explicitly social inputs and outputs, and/or game mechanics, built into it?
I agree totally with your insight here! The real challenge — the scary and exciting one — is to engage people who don’t already engage, and to do it at scale. I know my own projects need to improve significantly on the scale front — I am still trying to figure out how to engage millions instead of thousands. But in terms of echo-chamberness, my experience in games like WWO, Superstruct, and CryptoZoo is that a majority of participants are relatively new to action in that space. They weren’t necessarily “non-believers” or decidedly AGAINST thinking about the topic, but they weren’t actively engaging or doing anything constructive about it. So that’ s good and encouraging; games do escalate the level of engagemetn even for people already considering an issue. For me the tricker issue is scaling that up. Working on it! ^_^
Very interesting point, though I ageee with Curtis in that, counter-intuitively, I think it strengthens the case for a PSB. With media fragmentation and greater control over choice, PSB’s (while declining in share) represent the only examples (outside of Google) of a mass channel that represents a default/first stop
If a public service information programme went out on BBC1 or ITV1 at 7.30, it would probably still get 1-2m viewers. How many websites would the same content need to be seeded on to get an equivalent number of people (and an equivalent proportion of “oppositions”) to view online?
Of course, it also depends on the message you are trying to convey. Arguably, the type of person that actively seeks out new content is going to be a bit more widely read and willing to engage in new opinions than those who stick to the same few media channels, and who are potentially those people that the message is more crucial to reach.
Anyway, I’m blathering on now, but interesting post that has got me thinking!
@james absolutely agree – though it’s interesting when we think about broadcast tv as social objects, that the most social (ie. talked about / shared etc) programmes are, understandably, mass-market entertainment shows – and mostly reality shows at that – which means that as you say, public service content needs to work harder to have social inputs and outputs to enable that social dynamic where it’s not likely to come from mass shared viewing.
@Jane McG wow thanks for stopping by! an honour and a pleasure, I’m a huge admirer of your work. really interesting to understand more about the nature of participation – and extremely encouraging! but even if these initiatives don’t yet reach millions, for me it’s all about experimentation and trialling different things, so that, as you say, as you work on how to scale them up, you have the learnings about what’s most effective for the task at hand. for me comparing MMO games and the like directly with broadcast tv is a slightly unfair comparison anyway – they’re different beasts and if all you look at is hard reach, you’ll miss so much of the nuance (though that’s not to say scale isn’t important in the longer term). and in any case, it’s not an either / or, why not a both?
@simon def agree that even with fragmentation PSB still commands a broad and valuable reach, and that in hard numbers this will still probably dwarf numerous games and other forms of public service online content. but as I note above, for me they do different things in different ways, and ideally it’s not an either / or, but a both!