This Week’s Insights: Crowd-story site hits Hollywood… The audience has redefined TV, movies… How music fans built the internet… Technology has radically changed the concept of a “public sphere” for debate… Philadelphia’s cupholder debate shows the arts’ state of thinking about audience.
- Crowd Stories Are Now Competing For Hollywood: Hollywood has always depended on professional writers for ideas and stories. But web communities that are sharing and co-writing stories have become very sophisticated. Some of Hollywood’s biggest producers have turned to these communities as a source of more creative ideas. One such community is Wattpad. “It’s a nurturing, highly interactive community where its core 13- to 35-year-old readership spends around 20 billion combined minutes per month consuming and critiquing user-generated stories, in genres such as sci-fi, young-adult fiction, poetry, and horror, but also fanciful fanfic with titles like 50 Shades of Drake and Harry Styles Dirty Imagines.” And it’s a gold mine of ideas for Big Media.
- The End Of Traditional TV And Movies As The Audience Rises: Okay, so maybe “end” is hyperbole. But the point is that the traditional contract between media and its audiences is broken and being remade. “The internet is ruled by three words: individualism, unapologetic, polarisation. That’s very worrying in terms of news. It gave us Trump. In terms of art, though, it’s the best thing that ever happened. People will always go to the cinema. But the cinema industry is financed by certain films whose sole purpose is to maximise profit as fast as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what has changed history most in the last 20 years? A video camera and a telephone. One of the key things of the digital revolution is that sharing is a new definition of culture. People need to express themselves. The more you do that, the better a person you become.”
- You Thought Techies Built The Internet? Nope, It was Music Fans: How’s that? “In many ways, the industrial production of music worked well for music listeners. They gained more access to high-quality music of different types, in different forms, at the varied and often private times they chose to hear it than at any point in history. At the same time, the shift to industrialized, centralized music production disempowered the people who became audiences, reducing them to “consumers” in which their “only power is that of consumers in general, to buy or not to buy.” “Audience” is itself a “fictional construct” used to abstractly pull together distinct individuals having varied concrete experiences. Audience members speak with many voices, use music and other cultural materials in many ways, and have different levels of attachment to the objects of their attention. Industrial market logic views these people as atomized, perhaps with demographic characteristics by which they can be grouped and counted, but rarely as immersed in relationships with one another. But what really happened when people were carved off from what had historically been social co-participation in musical rituals was not that audiences became isolated. It was that listeners turned—as they always had—to one another.”
- Has The Internet Killed The Public Square? The concept of a public sphere as a place for public debate has evolved over centuries. It’s how cultures determine what’s important come to consensus. Technology has changed the values of the square: “By radically remaking the advertising business and commandeering news distribution, Google and Facebook have damaged the economics of journalism. Amazon has thrashed the bookselling business in the U.S. They have shredded old ideas about intellectual property—which had provided the economic and philosophical basis for authorship. The old, enfeebled institutions of the public sphere have grown dependent on the big technology companies for financial survival. And with this dependence, the values of big tech have become the values of the public sphere.”
- The Arts Are Behind In Thinking About Audiences. Exhibit #1: Philadelphia’s Cupholder Debate: The Kimmel had considered installing cup holders as part of the new-seating project, a feature which, presumably, would have encouraged beverage consumption — not to mention boosted concession sales figures — at Broadway shows. But after much discussion, that aspect of the new seat design was nixed. Cup holders would have cost more money, a Kimmel spokeswoman said, and since Opera Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Ballet were not interested in having cup holders (they don’t allow drinks in performances), the orchestra and Kimmel decided to apply that money to other aspects of the project.
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