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Emergence And Exploding TV

I've been enjoying Chris Anderson's and Jeff Jarvis' fascinating thoughts on "Exploding TV" over the past few days -- can't wait for Chris' Long Tail book -- and so this morning I went back to look at the passages that addresses this issue in Emergence. One of the funny things about writing more than one or two books is that you very quickly get to a point where you really can't remember what you wrote a few years before -- there's a vague sense of the topics, but the specific points are quite blurry. So it's always interesting to go back for a refresher course, particularly when you're writing in futurist mode. Here's more or less what was in the book (this is from my final Word version, not the printed text):

But TiVo and Replay -- and their descendants -- will also fall under the sway of self-organization. By 2005, 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 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 ultra-personalization 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 57th Street re-branding 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 homepage. 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 realcommunities, 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 pools 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.

The entertainment world will self-organize into clustersof 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 going tuning into HBO to see what's on. They'll be tuning in to the "Mafia stories" cluster, or the "urban 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 waves 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 entities -- perhaps the size of small cable networks -- and last for many years. Other clusters are more idiosyncratic, and fleeting. Some map on to the physical world ("inner-city residents"); some are built out 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 Carol O'Connor fans.")...

In the end, the most significant role for the Web 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. What the Web will contribute will be the meta-data that enables these clusters to self-organize. The Web will be the central warehouse and marketplace for all our patterns of mediated behavior, and instead of restricting those patterns to the invisible gaze of Madison Avenue and TRW, we'll be able to tap into that pool ourselves 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...

How does it hold up? (This was written at the very end of 2000, I believe.) First, it's interesting to see the total confidence in the Tivo model: it just seemed inevitable that TVs and hard drives were going to converge, and converge quickly. Certainly we're further along than we were five years ago, but the adoption rate has been much slower than I imagined.

It's also interesting to see the emphasis in my language on ratings and recommendations. That's ultimately not so different from what Jeff and Chris and others have been talking about, but you can see clearly that the underlying model has shifted in the past few years: the three self-organizing tools that had really impressed me in Emergence were Slashdot's Karma-based quality filters (which involved rating individual posts), Amazon's recommendations, and eBay's trust ratings. But Jeff and Chris are writing about Exploding TV as a continuation of the blogging explosion: so it's not so much about ratings as it is people and conversations.

The idea of the cluster, too, shows the extent to which I was influenced by group weblogs like Slashdot more than individual blogs, though of course Blogger was around and growing at a nice clip even then. I was trying to make the point that the future was not going to be a purely personalized Daily Me -- that there would be real communities forming out of this new information system. But perhaps the reality will prove to be slightly more Daily Me than I imagined, if your Tivo playlist is just a personalized RSS feed for video.

But on the whole, I wasn't too far off the mark, I'd say. (I'm curious to hear how the passage reads to others.) It's a nice use of the blog format for authors to go back and fact check their past predictions. (It's also useful for pulling something out of the dead trees format and into live circulation in the blogosphere.) Perhaps I'll try to track down a passage from Emergence or Interface Culture where I got something totally wrong, and we can all have a good laugh at my expense.

January 12, 2005 in Emergence |

Comments

Your stuff was so insanely right on it almost seems absurd for you to be critical of your predictions. nice to see something other than "this will happen in 05"....

Suffice to say we're an IT industry analyst firm that see ideas from Emergence as underpinning our conceptual framework. There are other places where Emergence touches The Long Tail too -


how come links disappear on the preview screen? have you set the link color the same as the background.

anyway thanks for all the great ideas

http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000365.html


I have used concepts from Emergence in consulting on all sorts of issues--such as system management frameworks.

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Posted by: J. Arnold | February 15, 2005 at 12:00 PM

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