vi-R-us

It’s been bugging me for some time now just how wrong the advertising, music, media and film businesses get it when it comes to online stuff. I haven’t been able to quite put my finger on it. The trouble has been that whilst I know there’s a massive void of quality understanding on a part of said industries, this hole the size of Texas is formless and hard to describe. That was until the other day when I was putting some slides together for the InSync talk at Sub-Zero I came up with a metaphor that might help do it.

Traditional business is about identifying flows and then somehow getting in the way as means to “monetise”. Take the film industry. Every part of the chain from getting the idea to the viewer watching a movie is owned, controlled and constrained to very few options and channels at each step. At every stage there’s another gatekeeper to keep happy, another trade off to make to move along the chain. There are very few gatekeepers and they know it. The relationship between ideas / creativity and power is thus not a healthy one. Good things but especially great things don’t thrive in these conditions. Like the dam above it is a neat, simple but somehow also brutish means to extract value out of the film making business. TV, advertising, media etc are all assembled the same way, with individuals manning the bottlenecks with a yes and no marker, often with a hunger for both commercial compromise and that lavish lunch that might help swing the needle into the yes quarter of their gauge.

So there is business, sitting on their dams, watching the kilowatt-clocks ticking over, and their cash-o-meter’s spinning round healthily, fielding calls from happy shareholders calling from their Lexus’ whilst pushing warm farts into the soft leather upholstery.

But fuck, there’s a growing fear, there’s a gut rumbling paranoia that there might be something coming, something that might just flip the whole thing. Maybe it’s not about water after all. Maybe it’s about………

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Oh and here’s a little film Iain made in response. i added a soundtrack i knocked up in reason:

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What PLANKTON!!!?

Yup, fraid so. So yes you’re sitting there on your dam feeling pretty good about yourself, looking out to the “difficult to extract any value out of disrupting flows -> SEA,” not knowing that even in its placid state is the site for billions of transactions and interactions that start with plankton and reverberate across the worlds oceans and seas, that takes no simple linear path but rather an infinitely complex network of energy transfer. You can’t slam a gate around this immense soup of value. If you did the turbines would just sit idle, silting up and eroding, perhaps providing a cosy hideout for a crab or two.

The machinery of business, like the turbines of the dam are strong and standard but they only like the water to flow in one direction, they don’t like change and they don’t like it when someone changes the rules or the materials because then this machine doesn’t work. However, this shift is more than just one of material change, it is also the location, structure, behaviour and atmosphere that have moved out of the range of tradition’s recognition.

So the next time you’re at one of those meetings where you can’t quite put your finger on why “they” are just so wrong, ask yourself if they’re water or plankton? It might help you work out if they’re capable of ever understanding.

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Oh and thanks for the photo I got from OHS Env’s Science Photos on flickr

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 8:35 pm and is filed under THOUGHT CORNER. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.