Emergent Digital Grassroots eXpo (edgeX) is some kind of social networking site aimed specifically at Ipswich residents?
8
“Knowing that a “build it and they will come” attitude will fail [...].” Perhaps in the case of Ipswich as a city, but QUT has an established community and students who WANT outlets for their ideas.
“On the Web, producers have this delicious freedom to produce content as long as it should be.”
“Longer viewing spans may speak to the maturation of the medium itself.”
NY Times ~ Rise of Web Video, Beyond 2-Minute Clips (13.07.2009)
Facts and statistics from the following countries:
US
CANADA
AUSTRALIA
GREATER CHINA AND INDIA
JAPAN
SOUTH KOREA
GERMANY
FRANCE
SWEDEN
Screen Daily ~ Global Piracy Report (10.07.2009)
“If you go back through history you can see there is clearly always value in what pirates are doing. It just takes us a while to figure it out. It is very easy to break a business model. It is hard to put a new one in place. And that’s the problem we are facing now.”
“The only way to beat piracy is to compete with pirates.” (Steve Jobs)
Proposes multiple games and social network markets as promising concepts to understand consumer co-creation.
27
“Social network markets [...] are the developmental stage of what may eventually become a mature market. These are markets because exchange occurs, but it is social connections and recommendations, access and attention that performs the coordinating function, not price. Strategies, business models and institutions that work in mature markets do not necessarily work in social network markets.”
28
“Consumer co-creation is thus not a context of ‘social and participatory cultures’ on the one side, and ‘the market and its individual rationality’ on the other. Rather, social network markets simultaneously engage both domains of motivations and coordinating institutions. Consumer co-creation occurs in this co-evolutionary ‘space’. Yet this is a continually transforming space of new cultural practices, new business models and other institutions that govern and regulate these exchanges. These are still emerging and developing, aligning uneasily and sometimes abrasively with existing industrial media era institutions.”
29
“Complex motivations do not necessarily lead to complex actions. [...] This suggests more attention to how identities, communities and business models associated with consumer co-creation adapt and change, rather than how they dominate or prevail.”
“Economic forces are not necessarily in opposition to cultural forces, but rather both continually accommodate and adapt to each other. Economic systems co-evolve with cultural systems (and with technological systems and political systems, etc).”
“There are always implicit contracts involved in consumer co-creation, even when not made explicit, and failure to recognize and respect these contracts was central to what went wrong at Auran. [...] Any attempt to unpack these into purely communitarian ‘gift’ motivations or veiled pecuniary motivations is unlikely to succeed. Instead, models of consumer participation in production and innovation will need to develop more integrated models of human action and institutional co-evolution.”
“It’s really about getting the balance right. The balance that is between making content easily accessible and maximising its value.”
“For at its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost every other form of popular culture struggles to compete with. This is why the economics of the film industry, the raw numbers, do not begin to describe the broader impact of the medium.”
Puttnam, D ~ In times of crisis, film must make itself heard (07.07.2009)
Theories about the construction of cultural value:
Veblen effect: “consumers attain their utility not only from the quality and
composition of a good, but also the price paid for it.”
Gatekeepers
Cultural commodification: over the last two decades artists have become more commercial
Place in product: it matters where a product/art comes from – i.e. Hollywood films.
“Social contexts are also where trends emerge and subcultures are translated into commodified goods. Street level and underground subcultures establish social contexts where their communities meet, and it only takes the bridge of one gatekeeper or entrepreneur into the mainstream cultural market to transform these symbolic communities into consumer products. Mainstream art/culture producers often view these subcultures as pioneers and tastemakers for a larger public and thus seek out the places where they emerge (nightclubs, music venues, bars, gallery openings and so forth) for inspiration for consumer goods.”
“Cultural goods are consumed and evaluated simultaneously in social realms.”
“The social [is] the most efficient mode of exchange and valorization of art/culture. Cultural producers and evaluators are aware of this effectiveness and thus actively cultivate the milieu. As such, the social is not the accidental byproduct (a “spillover”) of art/culture agglomeration but the raison d’etre of its existence.”
“Place matters to the value of culture because of the social production system so entrenched in the economic worth of art/culture. They cannot be separated.”
“If a good transforms from niche to mainstream, this often results in it trading its “symbolic” production for “large-scale” or economic production. This transformation in turn may allow it to gain economic legitimacy but at the expense of its symbolic value with original, niche consumers. The decrease of production, communication and distribution costs that may act as catalysts for greater (and more democratic) distribution of art/culture (Cowen, 1998) also, for better or worse, result in a more efficient transformation from symbolic to economic capital, or “subculture” to “sellout”.”
“Such constantly evolving social dynamics mean that art/culture’s value and the ways its value is measured is constantly in flux, as are the gatekeepers and consumers of its goods.”
Jeffrey Kim
Elan Lee
Timothy Thomas
Caroline Dombrowski
2009
Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality games, 2001-2009 (05.07.2009)
Elaborates on 5 Alternate Reality Games (ARG):
The Beast (2001)
I Love Bees (2004)
Last Call Poker (2005)
Year Zero (2007)
Free Fall (2008)
“The Beast was arguably the first ARG. The game was created to promote Kubrick/Spielberg’s movie A.I., and was designed and written by Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, and Jordan Weisman. The project was funded by Microsoft, and emerged when Spielberg asked for a way to let the audience know the world of the movie before seeing it. At first, the game designers thought they would create a series of linked console games with similar characters. Then, they decided more was needed — some kind of “glue” to hold the games together. That glue would be a set of Web sites that connected the characters and the setting of the movie.
Three months prior to the movie release, they canceled the console games entirely and focused only upon the “glue,” which did not yet have a name. They decided the entry point for the game would be on movie posters, although they e-mailed clues to gaming news sites as well.” The name later became The Beast.
Difference between Lee’s glue and mine: to him, the websites seem to be the glue, so The Beast is the glue; to me, the coordination, design, and technology are the glue, so the way the websites were connected to each other were the glue.
“Without easily accessible online access, a player is at a huge disadvantage.” ARGs are only possible because of an initial technological push!
“This suggests that storytelling cannot be only the passive, top–down experience familiar to content producers. Audiences demand a stage and a voice of their own.”
“ARGs are a form of collective storytelling.”
“ARGs are certainly not the end of the road, but they provide key insights into how storytelling evolves as technology continues to shift.”
“These communities are ephemeral, emerging for the purpose of a single game and dying off when the game is complete.”
“Although the game designers have a planned route in mind at the outset, the very nature of the game requires participation and player contribution. As a result, predetermined outcomes are rare.”
“Like the game designers, researchers must be adaptable and able to process the unusual diversions from planned routes. Models must be flexible to map to real–life social interactions. Currently, ARGs are dominated by their marketing purpose and tightly linked to product release. The pace and flow are tied to the product release, and data capture is only intended to guide the team of storymasters as hype reaches a critical stage. Researchers need to work with designers or create their own games to capture full sets of usable data.”
“No single methodology exists for analyzing digital social interactions. [...] Existing theories can provide windows not only into communication and game story mechanisms, but also into the gaps in this field.”
Relevant theories:
Very good and inspiring keynote!
Basically criticises independent film as being lazy and not independent at all. But we are at the threshold to become Truly Free Film.
Hope, T ~ A Thousand Phoenix Rising (02.07.2009)