Emergence
Page 20
This strangely hostile spot is part of an extended campaign for a “personal digital TV recorder” called TiVo. While the ad itself belongs to the gonzo marketing tradition usually associated with day-trading outfits, its message may be more profound—and prophetic—than its homicidal-slacker demeanor suggests. At first glance, TiVo (and its main competitor, Replay) looks like the ultimate in Daily Me–style personalization: the device is primarily a large hard disk that records television programming based on your requests. In this respect, you can think of TiVo as a VCR that has a really good user interface, and that doesn’t bother with the clutter and inconvenience of tapes. Because TiVo and Replay can analyze the program listings that you’ll find on your cable provider’s channel guide, the device can create automated filters that make your old VCR’s scheduling features look as sophisticated as a Mr. Coffee unit. You can tell TiVo to record every episode of NewsRadio that appears on any channel anytime, or to record any Steve McQueen movies playing this week. Because it’s permanently recording the last thirty minutes of television you’ve watched, you can actually pause live events or rewind them. The Einsteins at TiVo still haven’t figured out how to jump ahead two minutes into the future, but if you’re watching a program that’s previously been recorded, you can zap through the ads with a click of the remote.
The upshot of all this gadgetry is that when you sit down at your television set, the question becomes less “What’s on right now?” and more “What’s on my hard drive right now?” This is where TiVo proposes to chuck the network programmers out the proverbial window. If the suits at Rockefeller Center decide that Frasier should move to Tuesday nights, and Will and Grace should move to Thursday, what do you care anymore? All your TiVo needs to know is that you’re a Frasier fan, and you can watch the show anytime you want. You create your own prime time; you decide what you watch, and when you watch it.
This is a genuinely useful innovation, and while it bears some similarity to the original features of the VCR, the improvements in instant access and navigation make it a different beast altogether. And yet, it’s still a transfer of control that looks more like the original vision of interactivity: instead of the network programmers calling the shots, you call the shots. There’s a transfer of power in that change, but there’s nothing emergent about it. The TiVo device “knows” what you want to watch, and thus in some relatively limited way, it possesses a theory of your mind. But it only knows what you want to watch because you programmed it yourself.
But TiVo and Replay—and their descendants—will also fall under the sway of self-organization. In five years, not only will every television set come with a digital hard drive—all those devices will also be connected via the Web to elaborate, Slashdot-style filtered communities. Every program broadcast on any channel will be rated by hundreds of thousands of users, and the TiVo device will look for interesting overlap between your ratings and those of the larger community of television watchers worldwide. You’ll be able to build a personalized network without even consulting the channel guide. And this network won’t necessarily follow the ultrapersonalization model of the Daily Me. Using self-organizing filters like the ones already on display at Amazon or Epinions, clusters of like-minded TV watchers will appear online. You might find yourself joining several different clusters, sorted by different categories: retirement-home senior citizens; West Village residents; GenXers; lacrosse fanatics. Visit the channel guide for each cluster, and you’ll find a full lineup of programming, stitched together out of all the offerings available across the spectrum.
Despite the prevailing conventional wisdom, the death of the network programmer does not augur the death of communal media experiences. If anything, our media communities will grow stronger because they will have been built from below. Instead of a closed-door decision on West Fifty-seventh Street rebranding CBS as the “Tiffany Network,” a cluster of senior citizens will form organically, and its constituents will participate far more directly in deciding what gets top billing on the network home page. To be sure, our media communities will grow smaller than they were in the days of All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore—but they’ll be real communities, and not artificial ones conjured up by the network programmers. There will still be a demand for entertaining television content—perhaps even more of a demand than there is today. But it will be distributed over a wider pool of shows, and the networks won’t be able to force that demand on us by positioning shows in prime-time spots. The shows themselves will remain top-down affairs—the clusters won’t be choosing the ending of this week’s Frasier by popular vote—but the networks those shows find themselves aligned with will come from below. They’ll be created by footprints, not fiat.
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In a world where mass entertainment is delivered to us on our timetable, and according to our personal desires, how can advertising possibly hope to find a place at the table? If my TiVo device is already smart enough to detect my Audrey Hepburn obsession and my penchant for old episodes of the Ben Stiller Show, surely it’s smart enough to know that I have zero interest in Colgate ads. Already, there are software applications that strip out banner ads from Web sites. What’s stopping our digital filters from eliminating advertising entirely from our screens?
The answer, in a word, is nothing. If you thought the recording industry was frightened by Napster, imagine the terror on Madison Avenue. At least with Napster, consumers are still listening to music, even if they’re not paying for it. With devices like TiVo and the banner blockers appearing on the market, there’s a real chance that the public will stop tolerating ads altogether.
What are the salesman of Madison Avenue to do? There are three primary routes they can pursue. The first is to continue down the illustrious path that began with E.T.’s Reese’s Pieces: product placement. If consumers start zapping past your thirty-second spots to watch the real content, then build your ads into the content. This approach has the risk of triggering a kind of marketing arms race between advertisers and consumers: future sitcom stars may well look like Formula One race cars, decked out in a dozen corporate logos, while the software wizards dream up new dynamic filters to block those logos from view. Alternately, the advertising industry can borrow a page from the MTV playbook and strive to make the ads as engaging and as indistinguishable from traditional content as possible. Imagine a future where every day is like Super Sunday: TV watchers program their TiVos to skip the tedious game itself and capture only the ads.
There is a third way, however—one that doesn’t chip away at the wall between advertising and content, and that provides a genuine service to the consumer. And that is to make advertising smarter by tapping into the same feedback routines and self-organizing clusters that the content providers use. If advertising too starts to be rated and dynamically linked like any other unit in the mediasphere’s emergent system, then specific ads will naturally find their way to consumers likely to respond well to their message. Already, I receive automated messages from Amazon alerting me to new releases that match my user profile. At first glance, these e-mails look utterly indistinguishable from the worst kind of spam, cluttering my in-box with yet another “special deal.” But because I have a long and informative purchase history with Amazon, and because patterns in that history are generating the alert, I find the messages that Amazon sends me completely useful, and I often find myself buying items that they recommend. Having gotten a taste of this personalized advertising, I actually find it frustrating that other vendors that I’ve purchased goods from don’t use the same system.
Progressive critics invariably find something sinister in the notion of smart advertising: all those corporations tracking our interests, and serving up ads custom-tailored to our needs, based on some devious mind-reading algorithm. Once you look beyond the admittedly significant privacy issues involved, the resistance to bottom-up, smart advertising strikes me as being absurdly reactionary and shortsighted. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the development of adver
tising technology had proceeded in the opposite direction, and we had lived through most of the twentieth century with personalized ads like the Amazon e-mail alerts, and only now, at the beginning of a new era, did the technology arise that enabled mass advertising. All the social critics now up in arms over smart ads would be even more appalled by the blank, impersonal fire hose of mass advertising being directed at them. “These ads don’t have any idea what we’re interested in as individuals! All they know about us is that we’re part of some age demographic, or that we’re in a specific income bracket. In the old days, the ads at least used to know something about me personally. But these new mass ads are an affront to our individuality.” Of course, I wish there were fewer billboards in the world, and less spam in my in-box. But if we’re going to live in a world with advertising—and particularly if that world expects its entertainment to be partially subsidized by advertising—then I’d much prefer to see smart ads than stupid ones.
What’s preventing charlatan mind readers from spamming my in-box with fake personalized ads, or tweaking the hidden algorithm so that my interests happen to align with merchandise they need to move? It’s a legitimate problem, but it can be solved, presuming that two things are in place. First, we need strong anti-spam regulation that ensures that you can get off any mailing list at any time with a single e-mail request. Second—and most important—smart advertising systems should themselves be rated by the user community, at consumer sites like Epinions. You get book recommendations based on your ratings of other books; you sign up for a book recommendation service based on the service’s ratings. A huckster who rejiggered his filtering software so that the most expensive products were promoted would see his ratings decline, as consumers discovered that the smart ads weren’t all that smart after all. Just as you can adjust the quality threshold for posts on Slashdot, you could do the same with personalized advertising: sign me up for the most highly rated services and ignore the rest. Who knows? In a few decades, we might not have a need for the Consumer Protection Agency anymore—not because the corporations finally won out over the state, but because the consumers learned to regulate themselves.
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Most attempts to speculate on the state of the Web five years out focus on the endlessly scrutinized dream of “convergence”: the holy trinity of video, audio, and text at long last ushered into your living room via the same delivery mechanism, at speeds sufficient to convey the latest Lucas epic or Eminem release at the quality we’ve come to expect from CDs and DVDs. Once we hit that threshold, the critics like to tell us, the traditional media universe will no longer obey its previous laws of gravity, and a new order will emerge. What that new order will look like is a matter of great dispute. Some see a “one nation under AOL Time Warner” scenario; others envision a Hobbesian melee where everyone who sells zeros and ones is suddenly in the entertainment business. While the analysts disagree on the specifics of life after the revolution, there’s a general consensus that the rise of convergence will finally trigger that last storming of the network media barricades.
No one who has spent any time contemplating the tsunami discharged by Napster can say with a straight face that the arrival of genuine convergence won’t transform the media landscape. Two years ago, music downloaded from the Web was basically unlistenable for anyone who’d experienced post-Victrola audio quality; as I write, Napster’s worse-than-CD-quality MP3 downloads have the recording industry transfixed with abject fear. But convergence is not the entire story. From a consumer’s perspective, convergence will mean that the ordered universe of media offerings—prime-time sitcoms, top-forty radio, summer blockbusters—will be shattered into a million options, conveyed by a thousand providers. Turning on your television will be like logging on to the Web today: an infinite collection of links will beckon you—if not through the front door, then at least a few doors down the chain. This decentralized process is already under way: today’s breakaway Nielsen hits have half the audience reach of The Cosby Show or M*A*S*H—and only two-thirds of Americans are even wired for cable. Imagine what happens when there are a million channels; imagine what happens when channel isn’t the right word anymore, and we’re simply surfing a giant hard drive of every song, movie, or television show that’s ever been recorded. That is the inevitable future that awaits us at the other end of convergence.
It’s a future that looks a lot like the present. We’ve lived through a comparable period of information expansion since the midnineties. The information available online doubles every six months, and we all know the vertiginous climb that exponential growth produces. The information overload presented by the billion or so HTML pages has forced us to reach for new tools to manage that glut, tools that eliminate the need for centralized archivists or editors, tools that lean on the entire community of surfers for their problem-solving. The same crisis will confront the media providers of 2005: the crisis of overload. For fifty years, the television industry—and all its tributaries—has been predicated on the idea that running a show on a network at 8 P.M. on Thursday nights guarantees a massive audience. But in a future where everyone is running the equivalent of a million TiVos off their desktop home entertainment device, what use is 8 P.M. Thursday night? You watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it, remember? And what use is a network in an age of infinite connectivity—when every program ever made is only a few clicks away? Why bother pledging your allegiance to NBC’s “must-see TV” when it’s just as easy to find that Buffalo Bill rerun anytime your heart desires a little Dabney Coleman?
How will we find our way through that kind of a mediated anarchy? Maybe we’ll simply grow accustomed to the noise and learn to live with a remote control that feels more like a slot machine than a traditional guide. Maybe one opportunistic company will swoop in and become our primary conduit to the media frontier, as AOL partially did with the Web. But I suspect the overall media system will end up reaching a different equilibrium point, somewhere between Roman ultracentralization and the scattered chaos of the Dark Ages. Out of the turbulence of media convergence, the hill towns will appear. They’ll be built out of patterns of local behavior, and they’ll be in continuous flux. But they will give shape to what would otherwise be an epic expanse of shapelessness. The entertainment world will self-organize into clusters of shared interest, created by software that tracks usage patterns and collates consumer ratings. These clusters will be the television networks and the record labels of the twenty-first century. The HBOs and Interscopes will continue to make entertainment products and profit from them, but when consumers tune in to the 2005 equivalent of The Sopranos, they won’t be tuning in to HBO to see what’s on. They’ll be tuning in to the “Mafia stories” cluster, or the “suburban drama” cluster, or even the “James Gandolfini fan club” cluster. All these groups—and countless others—will point back to The Sopranos episode, and HBO will profit from creating as large an audience as possible. But the prominence of HBO itself will diminish: the network that actually serves up the content will become increasingly like the production companies that create the shows—a behind-the-scenes entity, familiar enough to media insiders, but not a recognized consumer brand. You’ll enjoy HBO’s programming, but you’ll feel like you belong to your clusters. And you’ll be right to feel that way, because you’ll have played an important role in making them a reality.
Think of the media world as a StarLogo simulation. It begins with a perfectly ordered grid, like an aerial view of Kansas farmland: each network has its lineup in place, each radio station has its playlist. And then the convergence wave washes across that world and eliminates all the borders. Suddenly, every miniseries, every dance remix, every thriller, every music video ever made, is available from anywhere, anytime. The grid shatters into a million free-floating agents, roaming aimlessly across the landscape like those original slime mold cells. All chaos, no order. And then, slowly, clusters begin to form, shapes emerging out of the shapelessness. Some clusters grow into larger ent
ities—perhaps the size of small cable networks—and last for many years. Other clusters are more idiosyncratic, and fleeting. Some map onto the physical world (“inner-city residents”); some are built out of demographic categories (“senior citizens”); many appear based on patterns in our cultural tastes that we never knew existed, because we lacked the tools to perceive them (“Asian-American Carroll O’Connor fans”). These new shapes will be like the aggregations of slime mold cells that we first encountered at the very beginning of this book; they will be like the towns blossoming across Europe eight hundred years ago; they will be like the neighborhoods of Paris or New York City. They will be like those other shapes because they will be generated by the same underlying processes: pattern-matching, negative feedback, ordered randomness, distributed intelligence. The only difference is the materials they are made of: swarm cells, sidewalks, zeros and ones.
In the end, the most significant role for the Web in all of this will not involve its capacity to stream high-quality video images or booming surround sound; indeed, it’s quite possible that the actual content of the convergence revolution will arrive via some other transmission platform. Instead, the Web will contribute the metadata that enables these clusters to self-organize. It will be the central warehouse and marketplace for all our patterns of mediated behavior, and instead of those patterns being restricted to the invisible gaze of Madison Avenue and TRW, consumers will be able to tap into that pool themselves to create communal maps of all the entertainment and data available online. You might actually have the bits for The Big Sleep sent to you via some other conduit, but you’ll decide to watch it because the “Raymond Chandler fans” cluster recommended the film to you, based on your past ratings, and the ratings of millions of like-minded folks. The cluster will build a theory of your mind, and that theory will be a group project, assembled via the Web out of an unthinkable number of isolated decisions. Each theory and each cluster will be more specialized than anything we’ve ever experienced in the top-down world of mass media. These mind-reading skills will emerge because for the first time our patterns of behavior will be exposed—like the sidewalks we began with—to the shared public space of the Web itself.