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 Danah Boyd, currently in the news over her blog-essay theory that Facebook vs MySpace represents a social divide, gave an insightful talk at Cannes 60 about the future of film consumption and the changing habits of young people's relationship to media. Thanks to OffBrand's Neil Maguire for the headsup - copied below. Danah's area of expertise is not so much film or technologoy as online social networks, and in between identifying the hits and misses from the film world's attempts to co-opt young people to market their films, she points out how while independent music is embraced by teenagers, indie film is not. Fair point and certiainly worth mulling over. Her arguments against DRM, in particular, present another reason why the current furore over the DRM on the new BBC iPlayer (finally set to launch on Windows on July 27) is worth considering. People don't want to put a full feature or even an entire Simpsons episode on their MySpace page - they want to stick that 10 second clip of Homer talking with his brain which makes them crack up like no-one else they've met in the offline world...
"By and large, we treat the Internet as another broadcast medium
where you push content at people. In other words, we're still aiming to
localize rather than to co-opt. A better way of conceiving it is as a
public space where people want to pull content in to personalize it,
identify with it, and share it. It is no secret that we're not yet sure
how to monetize this practice, but efforts to stop it are like trying
to build gigantic walls after planes were invented.
The audience of tomorrow is online. They're consuming video; they
want to be consuming film. There's unbelievable room for innovation and
creativity in this space. The technology is not stable and it never
will be stable. Successful filmmakers will need to pay attention to the
dynamics and optimize their strategies accordingly. We all know that
agility in the presence of challenges results in good art.
1) Youth are online to hang out with friends... they use media to jockey for status and socialize with their peers.
2) Youth do not and will not consume media whole in a passive way.. the
more they are able, the deeper they will engage. This means remix,
chopping it and sharing it.
3) Building walls to stop deep engagement scares off fans and never actually closes the loophole.
4) It is time for the film industry to innovate rather than trying to control. Many new opportunities lie ahead."
boyd, danah. 2007. "Film and the Audience of Tomorrow." Cannes Film Festival Opening Forum: "Cinema: The Audiences of Tomorrow", Cannes, France, May 16. Republished with kind permission. Original link
Film has gone digital. The digitization of film takes place at
multiple levels, but most noticeably: production, distribution and
consumption.
- Production: What cameras you use, how you do lighting, special effects, storage of content, editing of content, etc.
- Distribution: Advertising your film, DVD culture, download culture
- Consumption: remix, sharing, clipping culture
At each of these three levels, there are stages to how technology affects practice.
The first stage is TRANSLATION. Old practices are kept intact and
imported into the new medium. Many of you are familiar with this - your
cameras went digital but they still looked and acted like cameras...
for the most part. When advertisers began using the internet, they just
translated the marketing content to the web, making the web look and
feel exactly like an advertising bulletin board.
The second stage is LOCALIZATION. Folks realize that there are much
more effective and efficient ways of utilizing the technology to reach
a desired end goal. Practices are modified to take advantage of the
technology, usually to make things more efficient. At the same time,
these practices feel quite similar to the translated ones. Tickets for
films can be bought online and printed. People can sign up to be
notified by email when a film is released. Interpolated rotoscoping
(Waking Life) is an example of a visual effect style that existed prior
to localization, but localization made it much more doable.
The third stage is CO-OPTION. This is the stage when the pidgin of
film becomes a creole and new practices emerge that are completely
incomprehensible to those who were fluent in the previous culture of
film. You can see this in visual effects where things like animated
watercolor were impossible without digitization, but more radical
practices have to do with how viewers consume, share, and mess with
film. Think REMIX. It is easy to be terrified of co-option because much
of what emerges seems to go against the grain of what was normative
before.
Keeping this framework in mind, i want to talk about the AUDIENCES
OF TOMORROW, namely teenagers. To begin, i want to give you a sense of
the lives of today's teenagers and how technology plays into their
lives. Most of what i talk about when it comes to teen lives will be
American-centric, although some of it is playing out elsewhere around
the world.
TEENS TODAY
Most adults believe that the role of teenagedom is to get an
education; they emphasize school, homework, and learning. Yet, for most
teenagers, school is the place where they hang out with friends,
homework is a chore that they're required to do, and they are far more
interested in learning about the social world around them then learning
calculus. This is not new.
Teens try to spend as much time with their friends as possible. In
school, this means passing notes, finding friends between classes,
gathering with friends for lunch, and hanging out after school for as
long as possible. Even structured activities like sports are often more
about friends than the activity itself. Media plays a heavy role in
teens' lives. Their primary gathering space is friends' houses where
movies and video games are popular things to do with friends. In the
US, the mall and movie theater still dominate as desirable places to go
on weekends.
Of course, you're probably aware that teens are seeing fewer movies
in theaters now than in the past. You may be interested to know that
this has little to do with desire. Teens *want* to go to the movie
theater but there are structural limitations to their access.
First, there's money. Seeing movies is increasingly expensive and
fewer teens have the money to afford a night out to the movies. In the
US, there are fewer opportunities for teens to work and middle/working
class parents have less discretionary income now than they did 25 years
ago, making allowances harder to come by. Second, there's a lack of
discretionary time. Middle and upper class teens spend a lot of their
waking hours over-scheduled, running from activity to activity with
little downtime. Third, there's a mobility issue. In the US, having a
car is equivalent to freedom... without it, it's hard to get to the
movie theater and this is even more true now because the huge
movieplexes tend to be on the outskirts of towns, rather than easily
accessible by bike or walking. Fourth, there are structural limitations
to teens ability to leave their homes. Curfew and trespassing laws were
relatively rare 30 years ago, but are in almost every US town now. Yet,
more importantly, parents are afraid of all of the terrible things that
might happen to teens if they are allowed out of the house. These
forces affect many things, movie theater attendance being one of them.
Going to the movies for teens is primarily seen as a treat and
something that they beg to do when a big movie is coming out; when i
was growing up, going to the movies was the default activity for the
weekend. Again, this isn't about a lack of desire, but the lack of
access will increasingly affect the film industry.
The primary reason that teens use social technologies is to
socialize with their friends. Sites like MySpace serve as "networked
publics," where teens can gather with their peers, hang out, shoot the
shit, and jockey for social status. Although adults emphasize
"networking," most teens are simply communicating with the people that
they know from school, church, and extracurrics. What they are doing on
MySpace parallels what most of us did when we gathered in parks, malls,
parking lots, cafes, and other public places.
MYSPACE PROFILES
MySpace profiles are a way for teens to represent who they are to
their larger peer group. Their choice in what to put up there is a form
of digital fashion. While we are accustomed to accessorizing our bodies
when we go out in public, there are no bodies online. Teens have to
write themselves into being and they use various techniques for
expressing themselves. To understand a MySpace profile, think clothing
meets bedroom wall. Having a "cool" layout can be just as important as
wearing the right fashion label. Profiles are meant to show one's
tastes, values, and identity.
Identity is not constructed in a void. Much of how teens view
themselves is connected to the media around them. Furthermore, the
structure of MySpace encourages them to express themselves in
connection with said media. Upon creating a profile, they are asked to
list their favorite books, movies, and music.
Photos play a critical role in decking out both the bedroom wall and
the MySpace profile. Just as teens cut out photos of their favorite
celebs from magazines to plaster their wall, they snag photos from
around the web of celebs to highlight under the headings "heroes" or
"who I want to meet." Yet, unlike the bedroom wall, MySpace also allows
multimedia to be displayed.
It is important to note here that this was entirely accidental.
MySpace did not design the system to allow young people to add photos
and videos to their profiles. A few smart kids figured out that MySpace
forgot to close the loophole that forbids HTML from being added to the
forms. They quickly learned that they could add all sorts of things -
bold tags, CSS code, javascript, etc. An entire copy/paste culture
emerged where people swapped code to change the look and feel of a
profile. Needless to say, not everyone shares the same design
aesthetic, but MySpace certainly is colorful.
Shortly after figuring out how, teens started adding all sorts of
multimedia to their pages - songs, videos, animations, etc. MySpace
allowed them to continue, provided that what they copied was not
pornographic or code meant to cripple MySpace. In late 2005, MySpace
blocked links to YouTube because they thought it was a site dedicated
to video porn - most of what MySpace users were putting up from YouTube
was indeed porn. After some negotiations, Tom Anderson announced that
YouTube would no longer be blocked; he made this announcement on the
front page of MySpace, creating a small spike that set in motion the
rise of YouTube.
YOUTUBE
Teens have been watching video online for as long as it's been
possible. I should emphasize here that they are primarily watching
VIDEO not FILM. Most of what they watch would horrify any filmmaker.
They love stupid videos of all sorts - dog tricks, car crashes, and
anything featuring people who are destined to win the Darwin award for
utter stupidity. Internet video has completely replaced the TV show
"America's Funniest Home Videos." The next most popular genre of video
that they consume online is music videos. With MTV focusing on
content-filled programming, teens are turning to sites like Launch to
get access to the latest music videos. These videos combine their love
of music with an images of what's cool.
Some of what teens are grabbing is copyrighted TV or film content
and my understanding is that this is happening more outside of the US
than in the US. The most common scenario involves a teen who regularly
watches a favorite show. Due to a school requirement or parental
restrictions, the teen misses her/his favorite show and turns to the
Internet to find it. Likewise, movies are downloaded when teens have no
other way of getting access to it. In the US, teens are often unable to
rent movies because they don't have credit cards and relying on parents
is problematic at best. Outside of the US, they're restricted from
getting a new TV show or movie by the distribution companies who want
later international releases. Thus, they download. The more controls
are put in place to restrict who from watching what when, the more
people will circumnavigate these restrictions and find alternate paths
to access.
Teens are also creating their own video. It shouldn't come as a
shock that the two most popular genres of video creation are stupid
videos and faux music videos. By and large, these videos are created to
be shared with friends. It is assumed that these videos will not be
viewed by millions, not because they can't, but because they wouldn't
find it interesting. Much of what is created contains in-jokes and is
presumed to only be funny if you know the characters in the video. Of
course, this logic is problematic given how often they watch videos of
others doing stupid things and making mock music videos.
Some of the video that they're creating is highly problematic. For
example, there are numerous sites dedicated to hosting videos of
fights. When two teens are to brawl, people will videotape the
encounter as proof of the winner's success. Some of these videos are
staged for the video camera but others are actual battles in ongoing
gang wars. While this example is horrific, most of the video that they
are creating is much more mundane. Teens are messing with camera
settings, trying out filters, and learning editing software.
The faux music video is a great example of learning-in-motion. No
teen thinks that they are competing with the "real" music video. They
are creating these videos because it's a fun thing to do with friends
and sharing it with school peers can give you street cred. All of the
learning takes place as a side effect, but teens who do this type of
activity are much more comfortable making video for school and doing
other multimedia projects. Unfortunately, the RIAA is starting to sue
these teens for using copyrighted music content in their videos,
creating all sorts of ugly complications.
REMIX
Faux music videos are the most mainstream of remix video activities.
Music fandom is also the most mainstream of fandom. Fandom and remix go
hand-in-hand. Amongst the most passionate teenage fans, there is an
unbelievable amount of remix taking place. This fandom is not
universal, but these passionate teens often rally their peers to
consume the original content. Needless to say, fandom and remix
pre-date the net.
Written fan fiction - where characters from a particular story are
taken to tell a new story - has been around for ages. My hunch is that
it actually predates written stories... i betcha there was a lot of
remixing of oral stories in most cultures. Historically, remix was
institutionalized as a good learning technique. Throughout the 20th
century, a common assignment in a high school literature class involved
imagining that you were in the story and telling part of it from your
perspective. I remember loving writing about what I'd do if I was stuck
in "The Lord of the Flies." It wasn't pretty.
For decades, people shared written fan fic and visual fan remix
through zines. Not surprisingly, these practices gained a lot of
momentum with the Internet because the Internet made the distribution
process so much easier.
To the best that i can tell, video-based remix began in 1918 when
Lev Kuleshov began splicing and assembling film fragments to tell new
stories. He did this because there was no film available to make new
films, but he set in motion a practice that goes beyond filmmakers
today. What Kuleshov did was extremely difficult, but when VCRs became
popular in the late 1970s, fan-driven video remix emerged. Using two
VCRs, fans would spend hours mashing together clips from different TV
shows or movies to tell a new story. Once again, technology has made
all of this much accessible. While home video editing software like
iMovie makes editing ten bazillion times easier, the Internet changed
the rules for distribution.
I'm sure many of you are aware of the rise of remix. What you're
seeing is a combination of desire, creativity, and easy-to-use
technology. You're seeing fandom at its best. When people absolutely
love content, they seek to engage with it at deeper and deeper levels,
telling new stories, personalizing the content. When i interviewed the
creator of Star Lords, i asked him how many times he had seen Star Wars
and LOTR. His eyes grew wide and he told me he'd lost count. I asked
how many hours the video took... he told me that i didn't want to know.
He guessed that he'd spent well over 1000 hours pouring through and
chopping up footage to make Star Lords. Think about that: 1000 hours of
obsessively consuming his favorite content. Needless to say, he could
quote the films forward and back and he'd made most of his friends
watch the films over and over with him.
Many traditional artists are horrified by remix. It means that
consumers are mucking with your content, re-ordering it, playing with
it. This is one way of looking at remix. Another approach is to
recognize that these fans are the beloved supporters of the artist.
They want everyone to love the content as much as they do. They do not
see themselves as a replacement of the artists' creation, but they
worship the ground the artist walks on. Think of how many people are
watching this festival around the world out of deep appreciation for
the films you create.
Artists often complain that remixers are profiting off of artists'
work. With a handful of exceptions, the only "profit" that remixers
gain is street cred and kudos. An example of an exception is Robert
Ryang's "The Shining, Redux." A few years ago, the Association of
Independent Creative Editors ran a contest, challenging people to take
a well-known film and recut a trailer telling a story of an entirely
different genre. Ryang's winning submission was a sappy father/son
story made by slicing up "The Shining," a well known horror film. Ryang
was given numerous job offers following the viral spread of his video.
Personally, i think that remix helps showcase talent and that they
should be hired, not sued.
Most remix, video mashups, animated music videos, and machinema
(film made by "shooting" a video in a virtual world) is made by the
under-25 crowd and it's increasingly underground because of pressures
by the content copyright owners. This creative outlet is the result of
a new form of consumption, a very active form of consumption. People
are consuming cultural artifacts like film and regurgitating identity
expression. They are changing the rules of film consumption. But it is
part of a larger cultural picture that has been on the rise for quite
some time now. Again, the technology has made what was desirable to do
easier.
MYSPACE AND COMMERCIALIZED FANDOM
Let's return to MySpace for a moment because fandom is also playing
out there with very interesting commercial implications. Of their own
accord, teens are taking images and video from their favorite films and
TV shows to showcase on their MySpaces. This teen, for example, is
providing free advertising for the Transformers Movie. He's using the
content from a blockbuster film to define himself; in return, he's
announcing the movie to all of his friends. Technically, what he's
doing is illegal, but think about how many marketers would die to have
people tattoo their brand into their physical or digital being.
All throughout MySpace, you'll find teens who have clips from their
favorite movies. Not surprisingly, films like "The Big Lebowski" are
favorites. These teens don't have the entire film there - they've just
chopped out short clips that roll when their friends hit their MySpace
pages. Again, identity through multimedia and free advertising.
Teens are also creating fan communities around their favorite
movies. The Spiderman 3 production team did a dreadful job of making
their MySpace page interactive, so the fans created a separate
community to share their thoughts.
While most production teams treat MySpace like another place to do
broadcast advertising, some are starting to engage fans through the
site. Transformers The Movie doesn't come out for another two months,
but they already have close to 300,000 Friends on MySpace. Why? Users
are invited to sign up as either an Autobot or Decepticon as the was
begins. This motivates each team to try to rally others to play along.
This, of course, is a paid-for advertisement that users are engaging
with. While independent artists can leverage MySpace to reach out to
their fans and try to acquire new ones, the blockbusters are able to
engage fans at an entirely different level. For a tidy sum of money,
they are able to work directly with MySpace to get funkified profiles,
key placement on the site, and, for a few extra bucks, features
developed in their name.
Consider, for example, what happened when X-Men 3 launched. At the
time, the #1 requested feature was the ability to have more "friends"
in one's Top Friends. You don't need to know what that means, except to
know that teens were flooding the company with requests for this
feature. When X-Men's profile launched, everyone was told that if they
signed up to be "friends" with X-Men 3, they could get this desirable
feature. X-Men 3 acquired over 2.5 MILLION "friends" on the site. Put
another way, over 2.5 million users signed up to receive bulletin
advertisements from a movie advert. When Transformers launched
recently, they too funded a new feature begged for by users.
I'm not the biggest fan of hyper commercialization, but most teens
don't mind. In fact, they figure that if advertising makes access free,
they're AOK with advertising. Their only request is for companies to
just make the advertising relevant. They don't like when companies
operate as spammers, but they're so used to garish advertising all
around them that they've come to expect it.
INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS
I wish that i could stand here and say that MySpace is working as
well for independent filmmakers as it is for mega blockbusters, but so
far that hasn't been true. MySpace provides a portal for filmmakers
that primarily highlights indie film. Through this, independent
filmmakers have been using the site to create a community of
independent filmmakers but most haven't really leveraged their fans in
an impressive way. This is sad, given the successes that independent
musicians have had in creating symbiotic relations with their fans.
Part of this has to do with audience. While teens are in love with
indie rock, they are not that familiar with indie film. Most have
little to no access to it since it doesn't play in the Megaplex in
their town. Topically, there's often a disconnect because teens have
little interest in documentaries or serious film. Art education has all
but disappeared in the States as a result of the current standards
curriculum, further limiting their exposure to different approaches to
film. Given a complete lack of exposure to the artistic style of
independent film, many teens have no mechanism for interpreting what is
being shown. They are accustomed to two hours of heavy handed
adrenaline or emotional rollercoasters. College students are a bit
better because college is still serving as the primary training ground
for independent film watchers in the US. But even there, film is on the
decline because of the increased workload.
In talking with independent filmmakers in Los Angeles, i've been
startled to learn that many are actively avoiding the digital world.
Hollywood, on the other hand, is seeking to embrace the net and reshape
it in their image. Most independent filmmakers fear the Internet,
espousing concerns that if their material were to get online, they'd be
unable to make a living. While there is certainly merit to this fear,
avoidance is not a productive response. Through avoidance, you may be
able to protect your film from being distributed beyond your control,
but you are losing touch with your audience in the process. While indie
theaters are thriving in college towns and big cities and the
Independent Film Channel is chugging along on cable, the younger
generation has no fluency with the kind of film you are making. They
are not being socialized into an independent artistic culture; they are
being socialized into mass market culture, packaged for an
individualist society as "indie." Even online, where the playing field
is more even, what they see is blockbuster, not artistic or independent.
Personally, i'd love to see independent artists innovate on top of
the networked publics that we're seeing proliferate. There's no doubt
that the current economic structure isn't sustainable, but what's on
the horizon? What would it mean to rethink "trailer" in a digital era
where you can leave teasers around the web as treasure hunt objects
waiting to be found? How can you take advantage of what Henry Jenkins
calls "convergence culture" to allow aspects of the story to take place
across multiple media? For example, consider how the Matrix managed to
leverage video games, film, and comic books to create a cult fandom.
Most folks assume that all media should be used as advertising for the
film, but what happens when you create stand-alone experiences that
complement each other using different media? For those who are
unfamiliar with this multi-media approaches to media consumption, i
strongly recommend Henry's book.
CONCLUSION
Film is not disappearing, but the Internet is here to stay. It's
easy to play ostrich and pretend like nothing is changing, but the fact
is that the Internet is changing many things and, through your viewers,
this will impact you. When i talk about how mediated publics differ
from unmediated ones, i speak about four properties that are unique to
mediated public life:
- Persistence.
- Searchability
- Replicability.
- Invisible audiences.
These change the way that people communicate with each other, but
they also affect how they interact with cultural artifacts and you
create cultural artifacts. Film can always be turned into video,
regardless of what DRM you choose to use. Sure, DRM makes it harder,
but when there's a will, there's always a way and you lose your viewers
trust in the process if you choose to make their lives more difficult.
As we saw a few weeks ago with the HD-DVD hack, once information is out
there, there's no bringing it back. Once it's digital, it can be copied
and reformatted to make searching difficult. It's much faster to copy
than it is to clean up copies, for better and for worse. DRM will never
protect film but it will alienate consumers. DRM does slow the flow of
content, which can benefit big blockbusters but makes independent film
even more obscure. For example, there's no point in crippling a trailer
with flash DRM. Trailers are advertisements. Put it up on YouTube,
Revver, MySpace, everywhere you can think of... provide the code for
people to copy/paste your trailer into their blogs and MySpaces. If
people like it and want to pass it on, encourage them! Copy/paste! The
more people who hear about your film, the better.
I bring up DRM because as we think of the audiences of tomorrow, we
need to think of ways to engage them, not alienate and control them.
There's a lot of creativity in this room. Why put it into trying to
maintain status quo rather than taking things to the next level?
By and large, we treat the Internet as another broadcast medium
where you push content at people. In other words, we're still aiming to
localize rather than to co-opt. A better way of conceiving it is as a
public space where people want to pull content in to personalize it,
identify with it, and share it. It is no secret that we're not yet sure
how to monetize this practice, but efforts to stop it are like trying
to build gigantic walls after planes were invented.
The audience of tomorrow is online. They're consuming video; they
want to be consuming film. There's unbelievable room for innovation and
creativity in this space. The technology is not stable and it never
will be stable. Successful filmmakers will need to pay attention to the
dynamics and optimize their strategies accordingly. We all know that
agility in the presence of challenges results in good art.
So, in conclusion, here are four things to remember:
1) Youth are online to hang out with friends... they use media to jockey for status and socialize with their peers.
2) Youth do not and will not consume media whole in a passive way.. the
more they are able, the deeper they were engage. This means remix,
chopping it and sharing it.
3) Building walls to stop deep engagement scares off fans and never actually closes the loophole.
4) It is time for the film industry to innovate rather than trying to control. Many new opportunities lie ahead.
Thank you!
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