Deep Diving with IBM

On wednesday I went down to New York City to participate in part of IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook 3.0 for a deep diving brainstorm and discussion session on media and content. The basic format was moderated but unstructured conversation between a disparate group of a dozen+ people. In general the event was very worthwhile. There was a good mix of academics as well as industry representatives, college students, at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and executives from companies like Harley-Davidson, Sony, Xerox, and IBM. The conversation was interesting and ultimately too short.

One idea that was particularly interesting was an idea that the person from Harley-Davidson and I spent some time talking about, the idea of a ‘performance culture.’ Storytelling, through not only dialogue (especially video and blog enabled dialogue) but through self branding and artifact display (elements of which inform my colleague Aaron’s discussion on identity). This is something that people have said before but I think that our dialogue showed overwhelming evidence of this through tools like blogs, myspace, youtube (particular the popularity of youtube as a video dialogue tool). It’s not entirely clear to me that this exists as an opposition to consumer culture, because it uses elements of consumer culture (specifically in branding). I’ve always been fascinated by the ancients and oral culture, and if what Walter Ong said is true (and it seems pretty true right now) we are living in a second orality. Either because of the nature of our society or our advancement the tools for and social implications of this are distinct. Crafting systems of exchange for supporting this (outside of ‘advertising’) is still a tricky business.

I won’t say too much about advertising, other than the one comment I had at the conference. Advertising is about relationship. Does the advertiser have a relationship with me? Do they work within the context of that relationship? Advertising mediums that have been narrow have been able to target people pretty well. Magazines generally have good advertising, because they are so specialized. When you try to assume you have a relationship (thinking the customer who used a search term is a particular kind of person, for example) it can either be annoying or simply ignored. In fact ads where some understanding or sense of relationship with the target is assumed without sufficient evidence are much worse than the ads that assume no relationship at all. We highlighted efforts from Amazon and Netflix. These companies do have a pretty good relationship with lots of people. They know us. The suggestions and recommendations for us are effective, make sense and most importantly are actually worth looking at.

There is one thing post-session that I find particular troubling. It was quickly evident that we were intended to be representative of ‘our generation’ or ‘youth perspective.’ It was also clear there was some amount of divide between people at this session. However, I’m not sure if it was related to age or occupation (there were no ‘young people’ who actually deal with million dollar media properties in attendance). One quote from the GIO blog that I find somewhat misleading is

They have no sympathy for the struggles of media companies trying to protect their copyrighted material. They don’t use the word ‘piracy.’ They call it ’sharing.’

I think this oversimplifies what we were trying to talk about. Obviously we are less invested in media properties than the people from Sony (or even IBM) but I think this misses what we were trying to introduce in talking about sharing was beyond and off to the side of piracy problems. Yes we do use the word piracy. Sometimes sharing is piracy, sometimes its not, and it doesn’t always have to be. Semantics are very important here and unfortunately these terms can be pretty large suitcase words.

We were trying to introduce models of communication through media that acknowledge sharing as and important tool to communication. This was emphasized with a few buzzword issues like ‘viral’ and ‘transparency’. It’s also about the idea (I think Irving shared) that there are other advantages to supporting media propagation and information transparency beyond direct financial ones. It’s not as though putting digital content online introduces the problem of piracy so much as it offers new opportunities for distribution, unintended or not. Although Aaron’s discussion about degrading or altering content as it travels social networks was quickly rejected by the ‘anti-piracy’ block, this is the kind of distribution model that isn’t being considered. Nearly unlimited distribution that still emphasizes a premium content. The emphasis at the beginning of the conversation on DVDs is exemplary of not really getting how things are going or at least not embracing the realities of opportunity. One comment to the GIO blog suggests that at least some people get this, by Chris Ward:

The world will still be driven by dollars, I’m sure. But they will flow in different directions. Which directions?

The end of the session was about ’setting action items and commitments.’ Although I liked the open format of the general brainstorming, this part felt a little forced. Here we were being asked to ‘user generate content’ for no reason and with no real structure. I would be interested in working a project based on some of the issues we raised. I just didn’t see a very good link between the kind of ‘action items’ from the end of the session to actually accomplishing something. Clearly getting and using user generated problem requires a bit of finesse.